An Interview with Iris Murdoch

MURDOCH: I think this is a characteristic of the history of philosophy, that philosophical progress depends on great geniuses who appear at different times, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, and later Hegel, Wittgenstein. Philosophy depends more than other studies on great metaphysical visions. This is just part of the history of human thought that these visions do occur from time to time and then exert a very great influence, so that was what I was referring to.