Ebook Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper (Modern Library Paperbacks), by Bryan Mag
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Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper (Modern Library Paperbacks), by Bryan Mag
Ebook Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper (Modern Library Paperbacks), by Bryan Mag
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In this infectiously exciting book, Bryan Magee tells the story of his own discovery of philosophy and not only makes it come alive but shows its relevance to daily life. Magee is the Carl Sagan of philosophy, the great popularizer of the subject, and author of a major new introductory history, The Story of Philosophy. Confessions follows the course of Magee's life, exploring philosophers and ideas as he himself encountered them, introducing all the great figures and their ideas, from the pre-Socratics to Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, including Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, rationalism, utilitarianism, empiricism, and existentialism.
- Sales Rank: #645659 in Books
- Published on: 1999-05-18
- Released on: 1999-05-18
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.10" w x 5.20" l, .90 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 496 pages
Amazon.com Review
Confessions is a somewhat misleading term in this context: you won't find any lurid tales between these covers. Bryan Magee's memoirs-cum-histories of philosophy aren't even "confessions" in the self-flagellating tradition of St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
So what is Confessions of a Philosopher, then? It's a fascinating excursion through 2,000 years of wondering about the basic nature of existence and reality. As a 20th-century philosopher, Magee has a lot to say about his peers, and he spares no feelings. The "Oxford philosophers," who decided that philosophy was not about the nature of existence but about the nature of language, yet refused to give any consideration to fiction, are particular targets of Magee's intellectual scorn, while the late Karl Popper, a personal acquaintance of the author, is celebrated as a man who persevered in philosophy's true duties in the face of widespread academic frippery.
If you've ever wondered why we exist, you have what it takes to be a philosopher ... or at least to understand one. Bryan Magee's Confessions are thoroughly engaging proof that you don't need a degree to be a deep thinker.
From Library Journal
Magee has taught philosophy at Oxford, and in each of these volumes he attempts to make philosophy understandable to the lay reader. The DK book devotes just a few pages to each of the major thinkers and is lavishly illustrated. It would be suitable for high school, college, and public libraries. Great Philosophers is a series of conversations with important contemporary philosophers about the major historical figures, originally produced for the BBC. Confessions is an autobiographical excursion through Western philosophy.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Magee's book may not catapult philosophical discourse onto the talk show circuit or best-seller list, but it may breathe life into it for the general reader and modify the vestigial image of philosophy as separate from politics and everyday life. Told as a memoir, this book recounts the eruption of philosophical questions into the young Englishman's consciousness, beginning sometime before age five, and reveals his rather slow discovery that his interests were actually philosophical. Eventually Magee studied academic philosophy at Oxford and Yale, and in this book we have an account of the philosophers he studied or had the opportunity to meet, of his journey through the world of journalism and political philosophy, which lead to several books and passionate claims for what he has found valuable. Woven throughout is a highly detailed and engagingly readable explanation of the philosophical issues and problems with which he has grappled, a compelling tour of Western philosophical thinking from the Greeks to the present. Jim O'Laughlin
Most helpful customer reviews
54 of 54 people found the following review helpful.
A search for meaning
By Ralph Blumenau
Confessions can be of two kinds: confessions of faith and confessions of failure. Bryan Magee's vividly written intellectual autobiography has the character of both. His convictions make for exhilarating reading; but his failure to find in philosophy a reliable answer to his deepest concerns casts a shadow over the book, which darkens in the last chapter to a tormented despondency.
Magee's basic conviction is that philosophy is hugely important, in that it deals - or should deal - with all our ultimate questions about what the world, and therefore our existence in this world, is really like. His most trenchant attacks are on the Logical Positivists who dominated the Oxford scene at the time when he was an undergraduate there, and for many years afterwards. They ruled out as "non-philosophical" any discussion which was carried on in language that did not meet their narrow criteria of meaningfulness. The Linguistic Philosophers, who gradually took over from the Logical Positivists, were even less concerned with the truth or verifiability of a proposition. Instead, they thought that the principal task of philosophy was to elucidate the way words were used in practice, by examining, for example, the way in which the same word might mean different things to different people. They believed that it was not the business of philosophers to go beyond that and to produce any theories: as Gilbert Ryle defined it, philosophy was merely "talk about talk".
Magee describes these Oxford philosophers as having all the characteristics of a narrow and intolerant sect. They considered that Kant and Schopenhauer, who showed up the limits of empiricism, had so little to say that seemed to them "meaningful" that no acquaintance with them was required of undergraduates. Neither Kant nor Schopenhauer were part of the philosophy courses at Oxford, which jumped straight from Hume to Wittgenstein.
Magee had the strong conviction that the empirical world cannot be all there is: empirical and linguistic theories had nothing to say about those experiences we have, and have very intensely, which are therefore profoundly meaningful, but whose source we can hardly explain adequately: these include the arts (and especially Magee's great love of music) and intimate personal relationships.
After Oxford, Magee took a post-graduate course at Yale. He draws a vivid contrast between the cliquish atmosphere among Oxford philosophers and the broad and generous interest in the whole field of philosophy at Yale. There Magee discovered Kant, and at last he had found a thinker who spoke to his intuition that there was more to philosophy than the dry, narrow and limited fare that was dished out at Oxford. For it was Kant who explained that there must be a reality (the noumenal world) beyond the phenomenal world of which we have experience; that the noumenal world is something we cannot ever know because we are forced to perceive the world in terms of the concepts and categories which we have as human beings and which may not correspond at all with what Reality is actually like.
For Magee, however, the existence of a truth hidden from us has always been for him "almost intolerably frustrating" (a phrase he uses several times in the book); and so it was not until he discovered Schopenhauer that his thirst for a philosophical glimpse of what that Reality might be was somewhat assuaged.
In many ways, Schopenhauer says, we see ourselves phenomenally, as material objects mediated by space and time; but as material objects we are unique in knowing ourselves also from the inside. Because we are part of the noumenal reality, we therefore also experience something of the noumenon, as it were, from the inside, feeling the noumenon at work within us (even though we don't know what it is.) That experience is direct and intuitive; it is not the result of reasoning or of perceptions mediated by our concepts. It is not sensory at all and cannot be adequately described in sensory terms. For example, when we hear music or see a work of art, we can give a sensory description in terms of sound or sight signals we receive; but more significant is the non-sensory experience which transports us into a non-sensory realm, gives us a feeling of at-One-ness with something beyond ourselves, i.e. with the noumenal.
That discovery was for Magee an enormous enrichment of the way he understood himself and could establish in some way a connection between himself and the noumenon. But even Schopenhauer does not fully deal with Magee's "almost intolerable frustrations"; and we now have to turn to the second meaning of "Confessions": the confession of a kind of failure, the cloud that casts a shadow over his entire philosophical enterprise.
Almost throughout his life Magee has been haunted by an existentialist Angst, and he records times when this has plunged him into real terror. In his last chapter he defines the ultimate questions of philosophy as "questions that are of the greatest possible urgency for us, concerning as they do our annihilation or survival." He courageously admits, more than once, that the prospect of extinction terrifies him. He is not religious; he thinks that religious beliefs in any kind of immortality are based on wishful thinking; but he hopes desperately that there might be philosophical grounds for believing in some kind of the survival of the Self. If there is no kind of immortality at all, then life is absurd in the sense in which some of the continental Existentialists used that word. But Magee is not prepared to conclude that life is absurd; he is still hoping that philosophy may break through to produce a convincing argument for some kind of immortality.
Most of the book can be understood and enjoyed by readers who come to it with no previous knowledge of philosophy; the style is crystal clear, expansive and vigorous, except perhaps in the last chapter whose content is also rather harder going.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A Philosopher's Journey
By Keith C.
This is the type of book often written by scholars at the end of his career that looks back on their educational journey and shares what they learned along the way. An excellent recent example of this type of work are the reflections of Bernard Lewis.
Magee begins with the thought experiments that he made as a child and takes us on the roundabout journey he made to a formal study of philosophy ( recommending some influential books along the way)
At this point the book begins to become more of a history of philosophic thought ( if you are reading this you have probably read Sophie's World), but it is refreshingly honest in parts - as when he says philosophers pretend to doubt things ( like the existence of others ) which they know perfectly well exist.
I would give the work 5 stars except for Magee's refusal to think about the existence of God. His dismissal of anything outside of the material universe by saying that he simply never gave it any thought is simply lazy and not credible.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
an interesting & enthusiastic look @ the world of philosophy
By A Customer
Magee is a wonderful writer, first of all; my interest was held for nearly all of its 463 pages. By the time one gets to the book's penultimate chapter, "The Main Split in Contemporary Philosophy," one has already heard quite enough about said split, as that seems to underly virtually every other chapter in the book. HOWEVER, I (myself an on-again-off-again student of philosophy) have sometimes been turned off by much of professional philosophy's seeming nit-pickiness at the expense of tackling "the really big questions," and I have never seen (and never expected to see) such an eloquent and impassioned expression of this frustration as that found in these pages. Like me (and perhaps you), Magee HAS philosophical problems, and this is his story of grappling with them. And quite a captivating story it is. Philosophical ideas come alive in this book--if not consistently so, at least at times extraordinarily so. If this were a novel, I would say that its main character, Bryan Magee, is underdeveloped, but the author tells us up front that the book "is about ideas: the autobiographical element is medium, not message." For anyone wanting to get her or his feet wet in what Philosophy is about, or for an insider wanting a glance at someone who was personally acquainted with some of the greatest thinkers and ideas and institutions of our time, this is a great place to start.
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