Iris Murdoch, who was born in Dublin 100 years ago this week, believed there was no room for God in a properly adult religion – yet her ideas are becoming increasingly influential among philosophers and theologians

The late Oxford philosopher P.F. Strawson once suggested that Iris Murdoch is a much better philosopher than novelist. This was passed down to me at the time as a rather clever joke. After all, Murdoch was a Platonist (horror of horrors), her work is insufficiently analytic, and she makes the whole thing far too personal and emotional (“For me,” she once said, “philosophical problems are the problems of my own life”). No wonder she was more successful as a novelist than as a philosopher.

But today, the novels are no longer so ­fashionable, while her philosophy has ­suddenly taken a grip. Some of the most interesting recent work in moral philosophy is indebted to Murdoch’s vision. She shows us how to work in and with different philosophical traditions, and she rejects the still prevalent but increasingly contested assumption that science is the only measure of reality.

She also questions traditional disciplinary boundaries, expressing some of her insights in fiction and dialogue, and doing philosophy in a way which has an irreducibly theological dimension. And this work was done at a time when metaphysics was being all but ­eliminated from university philosophy departments, moral judgements reduced to expressions of feeling, and theological claims relegated to nonsense.