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Rating: 
Summary: Pompous Crap
Review: After slogging through most of this book, I had to stop and put it down. It is horribly boring, long-winded, and pompous. Most of McGinn's real philosophical work is beautifully written; Logical Properties, for example, is an outstanding piece of clear thinking and lucid exposition on difficult issues. But this book is written quite badly. I suspect that McGinn just wrote the book more or less off the top of his head to make a fast buck. Don't waste your time and money.
Rating:
Summary: Pompous Crap
Review: After slogging through most of this book, I had to stop and put it down. It is horribly boring, long-winded, and pompous. Most of McGinn's real philosophical work is beautifully written; Logical Properties, for example, is an outstanding piece of clear thinking and lucid exposition on difficult issues. But this book is written quite badly. I suspect that McGinn just wrote the book more or less off the top of his head to make a fast buck. Don't waste your time and money.
Rating: 
Summary: The Making of a Mysterian...
Review: Philosophers are rarely, far too rarely, given to write a treatment of their field for the general public. Far too many "introductory" philosophy texts claim, in the preface or the intro, that this is a book for neophytes, for philosophical hatchlings waiting to dive off the tree, for "absolute beginners" when, by the third chapter, they're deep into metacognition or technical theories or truth. More often they skim deep subjects, and the skimming only produces useless mist that leaves the beginner dumbstruck and asking "so when do I learn the meaning of life?" This book is thankfully not at the level described above. True, it treats some subjects way too briefly, but it at least does so in a way that will probably whet the appetite, not totally confound. McGinn states his intention clearly in the book (and no, I don't care about "Author's Intentionality" or the "Death of the Author", at least not now) to write a popular philosophical work. That he has attempted this is admirable. Unfortunately, the most likely reader of this work will be philosophers or academics, which are precisely the people who probably shouldn't read it. Colin McGinn may be "famous" but he's not too famous outside of academia. I have yet to meet anyone outside of "philosophical circles" that's heard of him. The testimony from Oliver Sacks may help, but most likely people looking for more than what's here will pick up the book, be disappointed that it's too cursory, and accuse McGinn of self-congratulation (he is a bit self-congratulatory in places, but one has to make philosophy seem worthwhile while one is attempting to sell it). All of this is too bad, because the book does succeed in many places in making the "philosophical life" sound at least intriguing, challenging, and worthwhile. Insiders already know the life, and so that part of the book will probably be lost on them. Some of the more interesting passages deal with politics in academia. Those who flew to academia to escape the politics of corporate life and business did not escape as completely as they thought. In academia you get put in your place. In academia there is nepotism, cronyism, pointless squabbles over who gets what position and why, and the always dreaded budget looms and threatens your projects, positions, and teaching loads. McGinn shows glimpses of this part of academia throughout the book. His run in with Micheal Dummett (who he claims ran him down in front of colleagues, though we obviously don't hear Dummett's side) and his depressing falling out with Oxford are just two salient examples. Overall the book is a fast read, except for some passages that get a little more into the nitty gritty of technical details (but not too much). This book will not teach you how to be a philosopher, nor will it teach you philosophy (except at a very microscopic level). It may inspire you to look into philosophy, or to read St. Anselm, or Chomsky, or Saul Kripke, or Wittgenstein. Maybe some readers can relate with McGinn's "philosophical seduction" by the writings and life of Bertrand Russell (Russell did have an uncanny knack for writing books that make readers feel intelligent just for reading them; he is very seductive), but these readers will not be newcomers. After all, McGinn claims in the last chapter that Jennifer Aniston has never heard of Russell, or even Descartes for that matter, which is surprising (who hasn't heard of the "I think therefore I am" guy?). McGinn has some healthy messages for the institution of philosophy. One of them is that philosophy should not be a science. 20th century philosophy, particularly Russell's philosophy - as a negative example - and the "linguistic turn" have suggested this. If philosophy were to become a science then scientists would truly be correct when they claim that philosophy is redundant. A second message is that certain philosophical questions may simply be beyond the human cognitive domain (McGinn's philosophy was rewarded with the moniker "mysterian" for this claim). Whether this is true or not it is a position to be considered when answering philosophical questions. The book does not talk about the practical aspects of philosophy, or how can the average person could potentially use philosophy in their daily lives, which is too bad. Its focus is mostly the academic realm, which is a focus that runs the risk of losing some readers who are either unsympathetic towards or clueless about this strange sect. Nonetheless, the book is a good read and could serve as a good introduction to someone considering the "philosophical life" (read "academic philosophical life") as a career. There are warnings to heed in this book for the philosophical careerists out there.
Rating: 
Summary: Writing for general public is not THIS easy
Review: Professor McGinn seems to be rather proud of his writings for the general public. I haven't seen the other popularizations, but I suspect that he has got a little carried away with his earlier successes. This is not an actually bad book, but shallow it is. You get a potpourri of anecdotes, how a poor boy goes to university and then enters a conveyor belt of promotions and job offers. In between the details of his CV you also get rather two-by-four style tutorials on (mostly) linguistic philosophy. And that's about it. No insights to speak of, no life-changing ideas. Very little about "twentieth-century philosophy". No story about how to make a philosopher. Good idea, lazy thinking, sloppy writing.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth a Look
Review: This book is both a memoir and yet another introduction to philosophy. McGinn tries to come at introducing philosophy in a different way: through his autobiography and through the issues that prompted his interests in philosophy, the ideas he found interesting as a young man studying philosophy, and what he has thought about at particular times in his career as an academic. The results are rather mixed. You don't get much of substance here, and so you should look somewhere else if you're searching for a serious and comprehensive introduction to philosophy. But this book does cover enough ground to give you a taste of what current academic philosophizing is like. It includes a breezy, straightforward picture of the life of an academic along with brief sketches of lots of interesting philosophical issues. Furthermore, there's not a lot of history covered here; the emphasis is on a few historically important philosophical issues and the more striking arguments and positions that have been defended in contemporary analytic philosophy. So this really gives you an account of what professional life is like for people working in contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosophy, the tradition in which McGinn works. It appears McGinn intends the reader to come to philosophy in the same way he did. We go from the vague, somewhat confused ideas and concerns that first led McGinn to philosophy to immersion in ideas and concerns of current-day professional philosophers. Now, this emphasis on the intellectual development might seem too limited a perspective from which to introduce a subject. But this isn't such a problem here since specialization isn't as extreme in philosophy as it is in other parts of the academy. Since the division of intellectual labor here isn't as extreme as it is in the sciences, all philosophers tend to know a lot of the same stuff. The book is quite interesting at the beginning, and I think the first couple of chapters would be a good introduction to just what philosophical thinking is like. Here there are very few details about McGinn's early life, and he concentrates on only those elements of his autobiography that are relevant to his intellectual development and his eventual interest in philosophical questions. So these chapters are concerned with the kinds of philosophical problems that are likely to be of interest to those without much, or any, background in the subject. Skepticism, free will, the existence of God--these are the sorts of issues that are introduced in this chapter. McGinn doesn't say a great deal about these issues here, though he says enough to reveal how philosophers attempt to answer them and how they criticize or defend the answers given by others. The latter chapters come to focus more on the nature of life in academia and the issues that get discussed in contemporary analytic philosophy along with McGinn's own intellectual development as an academic. So we really get two stories here. The first story is the one of McGinn's rise to prominence in academia, and the other is the story of major issues in U.S. and U.K. philosophy from the sixties to the present. And these stories are interconnected since McGinn is a prolific thinker who has published on nearly everything of central importance in contemporary metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Some of the highlights he mentions are Davidson and Quine on meaning, Wittgenstein and Kripke on rule-following, Kripke and Putnam on reference, David Lewis on possible worlds, Dummett's anti-realism, Nagel's views about the mind and its relation to the body. And whenever McGinn discusses someone's ideas, he attempts to provide a brief portrait of them. Whatever one thinks about McGinn's personality--and some aspects of it can be off-putting--his discussions of issues here is pretty even-handed. While he occasionally says unflattering things about other philosophers, but he's more even-handed when it comes to their ideas--even those ideas with which he isn't sympathetic. He doesn't ridicule the ideas of others; nor does he use the book to push his own ideas on the topics he discusses.
Rating:
Summary: Worth a Look
Review: This book is both a memoir and yet another introduction to philosophy. McGinn tries to come at introducing philosophy in a different way: through his autobiography and through the issues that prompted his interests in philosophy, the ideas he found interesting as a young man studying philosophy, and what he has thought about at particular times in his career as an academic. The results are rather mixed. You don't get much of substance here, and so you should look somewhere else if you're searching for a serious and comprehensive introduction to philosophy. But this book does cover enough ground to give you a taste of what current academic philosophizing is like. It includes a breezy, straightforward picture of the life of an academic along with brief sketches of lots of interesting philosophical issues. Furthermore, there's not a lot of history covered here; the emphasis is on a few historically important philosophical issues and the more striking arguments and positions that have been defended in contemporary analytic philosophy. So this really gives you an account of what professional life is like for people working in contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosophy, the tradition in which McGinn works. It appears McGinn intends the reader to come to philosophy in the same way he did. We go from the vague, somewhat confused ideas and concerns that first led McGinn to philosophy to immersion in ideas and concerns of current-day professional philosophers. Now, this emphasis on the intellectual development might seem too limited a perspective from which to introduce a subject. But this isn't such a problem here since specialization isn't as extreme in philosophy as it is in other parts of the academy. Since the division of intellectual labor here isn't as extreme as it is in the sciences, all philosophers tend to know a lot of the same stuff. The book is quite interesting at the beginning, and I think the first couple of chapters would be a good introduction to just what philosophical thinking is like. Here there are very few details about McGinn's early life, and he concentrates on only those elements of his autobiography that are relevant to his intellectual development and his eventual interest in philosophical questions. So these chapters are concerned with the kinds of philosophical problems that are likely to be of interest to those without much, or any, background in the subject. Skepticism, free will, the existence of God--these are the sorts of issues that are introduced in this chapter. McGinn doesn't say a great deal about these issues here, though he says enough to reveal how philosophers attempt to answer them and how they criticize or defend the answers given by others. The latter chapters come to focus more on the nature of life in academia and the issues that get discussed in contemporary analytic philosophy along with McGinn's own intellectual development as an academic. So we really get two stories here. The first story is the one of McGinn's rise to prominence in academia, and the other is the story of major issues in U.S. and U.K. philosophy from the sixties to the present. And these stories are interconnected since McGinn is a prolific thinker who has published on nearly everything of central importance in contemporary metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Some of the highlights he mentions are Davidson and Quine on meaning, Wittgenstein and Kripke on rule-following, Kripke and Putnam on reference, David Lewis on possible worlds, Dummett's anti-realism, Nagel's views about the mind and its relation to the body. And whenever McGinn discusses someone's ideas, he attempts to provide a brief portrait of them. Whatever one thinks about McGinn's personality--and some aspects of it can be off-putting--his discussions of issues here is pretty even-handed. While he occasionally says unflattering things about other philosophers, but he's more even-handed when it comes to their ideas--even those ideas with which he isn't sympathetic. He doesn't ridicule the ideas of others; nor does he use the book to push his own ideas on the topics he discusses.
Rating:
Summary: autobiography that reveals warts and all
Review: 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.
This 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 philosophy as 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.
Rating:
Summary: Not half bad; about half good.
Review: When I read this, Rutgers philosopher Colin McGinn's autobiography, I wanted to do so as if I were just coming to the subject myself. What impressions would I, a young person wanting to explore philosophy a bit more, get out of it? Unfortunately, what happened was this: I read it 'as' that young person, decided philosophy was too boring, but my older more experienced philosophical self kept wanting to 'jump in' and rewrite sections of the book. Maybe I could make it more interesting than McGinn. This is not to suggest that I literally could; just to point out a big problem with the book. Philosophically (even for a beginner) it is boring. It focuses much on the philosophy of language and, to be honest, questions no one (sorry, you linguistic philosophers out there) cares about. What do we mean when we refer to an object? Is a thing merely ts traits, or is it an actual thing that has traits? What is it really to follow a rule? As one who is quite read in philosophy, I can tell you that this is why most people are not read in philosophy. If the beginner wants a good and accessible intro, go to Bryan Mageee's "Confessions of a philosopher". Same format as this - an autobiography. It is just much better as it talks much about the issues that most laypersons will fin more interesting like the nature of knowledge (what do we know versus guess at), what existence is, and other such things. Now, if you are NOT expecting any sort of intro to philosophy, this might be a great book for you. For me, it was very helpful as I am applying right now for my doctorate in political philosophy. McGinn spends much of his time on the workings of academia and what being an academic and philosopher is all about. This part was thrilling to me! From McGilnn's unfortunately heated exchange wlth fellow philosopher Michael Dummett, to his Oxord days, to the details of when, where, and why, he came to the conclusion that the mind/body problem, amongst others, could not be solved at all. Interesting stuff! Overal, then, I gave the book a three. To summarize, if you are new to philosophy and want your appetite whetted don't look for it here. GEt either Magee's above mentioned book, "From Socrates to Sartre", or if you've the patience and interest, Russell's "History of Western Philosophy". For academics and the laity well read in philosophy, this will be a fun book, but only as a 'beach read'.
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