Reviews for Making of a Philosopher My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy

The average rating for Making of a Philosopher My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-03 00:00:00 Bryant Sweeney You know, any mate of Jonathan Miller’s is a mate of mine. And it is worse than that, the cover of this book has quotes with the highest praise from both Oliver Sacks and Stephen Pinker. This bastard knows people I can only dream of knowing. Worse, they are even prepared to say incredibly nice things about him. I’ve no idea if I should love him or hate him. I couldn’t have come to a book with higher expectations. Miller interviews McGinn in his utterly masterful The Atheist Tapes and A Brief History of Disbelief. There are few people I would be prepared to prostrate myself before – but Miller is one of them. I mean, not only would this guy be one of my heroes just for his religious beliefs (or lack there of), but he directs plays of Shakespeare, operas, does documentaries on the human body, and was one of the original members of Beyond the Fringe - as someone once said, “once you’re finished with your life, do you mind if I have a go?” And McGinn was one of the highlights of Miller’s Atheism documentaries. Their conversations were really remarkably interesting. You know you are waiting for it – you want me to say this book is crap. Well, it sort of was, but not totally. I think it was a book that didn’t quite know what it wanted to be. I would have said it was a complete waste of publication if it wasn’t for the last 50 or so pages. This is a book that is trying to be an autobiography and a kind of introduction to the problems that have fascinated a particular philosopher. Look, I’ve an undergraduate degree in Philosophy, so I’m going to find this sort of thing interesting, even if other people would find it as dull as dish water, but even I had troubles. There was a time when I thought I would quite like to become a philosopher – admittedly before I first read Plato’s Gorgias and began to question the entire philosophical project – despite this being the opposite of the message of the Plato’s dialogue. If only Plato had answered Callicles’s concerns as well as he had stated them… I would have liked either more detail on McGinn’s life or more detail on his philosophy. The whole thing left me oddly unsatisfied. I think this is because I can say so little about either his life or his philosophy. I know, this doesn’t make much sense, but all the same, I came away really quite liking him as a person, but so be it. You know, I can’t even tell you if McGinn is straight or gay. Now, what sort of autobiography leaves that an open question? A pretty hopeless one, I would have to say. I was very nearly going to give up on this book, but towards the end there is a wonderful bit where he talks about his fight with Daniel Dennett (of Consciousness Explained fame) and I was totally fascinated. But he doesn’t explain enough of the philosophy to let me understand or for this whole part to be really as interesting as it ought to be. I know, I’m not begin clear, so let me explain. McGinn claims in this book that he has had a very original insight into the nature of the mind / body problem and that that insight has upset a lot of philosophers. The mind / body problem comes from Descartes (remember at high school, you had to draw graphs on X and Y planes? Well they are called Cartesian planes and were named after my mate Descartes). Descartes is famous for saying – I think therefore I am. I don’t want to get too side-tracked, as I need to talk about Kant in a minute too, but saying this most famous of quotes also contains his major ‘contribution’ to Western Philosophy – the mind / body split. Descartes held that what is mind is not body and what is body is not mind. I think it is pretty close to Philosophy’s greatest mistake. Oh, if only there was space to explain and there could be an end to dualism… Kant is the first modern philosopher (this is as close to a heresy as I’m capable of uttering as by saying this I have to ignore my dear, incomparable Hume) but Kant is a modern philosopher in a very odd sense – one who was trying to resurrect Aristotle (rather him than JC - although given Kant’s religious allegiances, perhaps both). Anyway, Kant was fascinated with one question in particular. Up until him philosophy was in a bit of a quandary – there were two sides, Empiricism (everything that comes into our minds is first in our senses) and Rationalism (oh, I don’t know, with our thoughts we make the world???) Anyway, Kant wanted to end this increasingly pointless split in philosophy. And he did so by asking if our brains were actually up to the task of understanding the world – thereby more or less creating dualism. His greatest work is called, A Critique of Pure Reason – and it seeks to find out if the human brain is up to the task of understanding the world. His answer is that we simply can’t understand the world as it is in itself. This is referred to as the unknowability of the thing-in-itself. We understand the world as ‘humans’, but we can’t understand the world as it really, really is. This is seen by many people as Kant’s major contribution to Philosophy. It is the birth place of much of modern philosophy (I would be unkind enough to say that Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, the whole of Existentialism and even James, Dewey and the Instrumentalists can’t be understood at all without understanding Kant on this point. You know, that doesn’t leave a lot of modern philosophy. I’m trying to stress that this is a pretty important point). I would go so far as to say that Hegel’s critique of this point missed the point of how important it would later be. Hegel thought he killed off 'the unknowability of the thing in itself' in his introduction to his Science of Logic – but that was not to be. So, when McGinn says his greatest contribution to modern philosophy is that he questioned whether our brains are up to the task of ever understanding the world – well, you know, Kant had already ‘settled’ that question three hundred years ago. I can only assume that I’ve not understood what McGinn is saying here. Look, I’m pretty thick – I know I come across as a pretty articulate kind of guy – but really, most of it is bluff. I know I really know nothing about these things and that it is easy to know infinitely more than I do – but it really annoys me when I’m trying to follow something and then someone claims something that is much more than I know they ought to. This sounds like I disliked this book much more than I did. I actually really liked McGinn after reading this, I thought he was really a nice sort of person and I thought his interaction with Anthony Hopkins was inspired – but he has left me wanting more. I guess I’ll need to read one of his ‘real’ books now…

Review # 2 was written on 2008-11-05 00:00:00 Joshua Kaatz An interesting intellectual journey with Colin McGinn, as he recounts his love and pursuit of all things philosophical. I learned some of the fundamentals of modern philosophical thought along the way; and found out that Daniel C. Dennett and Colin McGinn differ greatly in their assessment of the conscious mind. McGinn believes that the secret behind how the mind and body work together will forever remain a mystery. Dennett believes in our ability to solve life’s great mysteries. The book is a quick read as it follows McGinn’s teaching career, and the various papers and books he wrote along the way.