Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #288571 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Oliver Sacks
Brilliantly written, devastatingly honest, often very funny, and tells a personal story as fascinating as the philosophical one. Engrossing

Stephen Pinker
McGinn is an ingenious philosopher who thinks like a laser and writes like a dream

New Statesman
A superb intellectual autobiography ... one of the best introductions to contemporary Anglo-American philosophy

Customer Reviews

Popular philosophy?
It is only on the page before last we find the author's intentions: to make philosophy "intelligible to the layperson." This is an ambitious attempt but falls short - to participate in philosophy requires a good grasp of the terms, knowledge of what came before, and various skills for posing questions, constructing and analyzing positions, etc. The approach to give "the gist of it" sometimes works, it is readable and not exactly 'dumbed down', but still feels unsatisfactory.

Mr. McGinn's 'big thing' was proposing that our minds are not capable of understanding our minds! It is simply beyond our limits, in the way that dogs are never going to grasp the theories of Einstein! This is possible to appreciate and value; although a negative in terms of human endveour, it is honest enough to challenge our self-delusions ("God created man in his own image").

The book also gives an open account of academic life, the struggle for recognition and advancement, the rivalries, the mechanics and personal drive which propel the system.

Overall, I got to say there have been more successful writers when it comes to popularising philosophy.

intersting autobiograpy, uninspiring philosophy
This book lends itself readily to comparison with Bryan Magee's 'Confessions of a Philosopher' since it follows a similar line - a sense of exasperation with analytic philosophy and the excitement of American philosophy, but there the comparison ends. It is unfortunately a less weighty book in terms of the ideas it explores, and seems to be rooted in only a few strands of philosophical enquiry that are peculiarly British and fixed in the 20th century. Even here, the half page given over to existentialism is not only woefully inadequate, it is a dreadful interpretation that cannot begin to approach the significance of this line of enquiry.
Thisa is hardly surprising. Despite his own protestations, one gets the feeling that whatever modern philosophy has become, or is becoming, it longs to become a science, and knows simultaneously that this could never happen. Despite this quandary, one feels there is a constant pursuit in philosophy to find some logical scheme that could make this happen, just as theories of everything are pursued in science but fated to be forever out of reach. But in the case of philosophy, the elusiveness of this holy grail is threatening philosophy with a sense of its own redundancy.
The irony is that it is the very status of science that philosophy should be challenging, and this is an enquiry notable by its absence in this book. Such a challenge could help invigorate both categories of understanding and could, I feel, throw a better light on traditional problems such as, say, the body/mind dichotomy, and could go further in understanding it than is possible with McGinn's 'mysterians'. These come across as modern day equivalents of the noumenal, the very notion that modern philosophy is striving to move away from, but this seems to be the limit of understanding that is available in philosophyas it is now practiced, and seems to be something of a dead end. That the book ends with a sense of its own futility base on this limit does not speak well for philosophy as a method of enquiry, nor will it endear itself to a wider audience if this is the best it can do. It only helps to further the status of science which often complains of the redundancy of philosophy, and that it must therefore further the cause of understanding without its aid. In this way, science and philosophy both suffer, and the result of it has been a revived dogmatism that has led to the usual apathy and sense of helplessness that is the hallmark of a dogmatic era.
The irony of taking the autobiographical approach to this subject is that it displays the pursuit of philosophy as an incestuous practice, of who is rubbing shoulders with whom. Perhaps that is how ideas have always been engendered, but sadly, philosophy (since it produces nothing useful by its own nature) comes across as an intellectual pastime played amongst its own peers. It may be difficult, but attraction to such a pursuit must have something more to offer than simply learning a specialised language in order to become a club member. There are still rich veins of enquiry to mine, and at the end of this book, I am left with a feeling that this will not occur nor be instigated in the universities.

A Magnificent incite to the World of Philosophy
I came across this book having read an article on him in a newspaper. I bought it, and have never been so interested by a book. It is truly thought provoking.

I am a complete novice when it comes to philosophy. The joy of this book is that it takes you through many philosophical topics: the mind and the brain, linguistic philosophy and the existence of God, whilst not getting too heavy! The philosophical discussions are dispersed with light biographical recollections to easethe brain after a bit of serious thought.

I would recomend this book to anyone with even a minor interest in philosophy, regardless of their previous philosophical experience!