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Bryan Magee, RIP

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A well-known popularizer of philosophy has passed away.

 Bryan Magee died on July 16 in a hospital after a long illness.

 Magee was the author of MEN OF IDEAS (1982), PHILOSOPHY AND THE REAL WORLD (1985), CONFESSIONS OF A PHILOSOPHER (1997), and WAGNER AND PHILOSOPHY (2001), etc.
He was a great popularizer of philosophy for non-academic audiences, adept at breaking down complex problems into their component parts and presenting them in ordinary (and non-patronizing!) prose.

 It was Magee's view that Immanuel Kant brought about "the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy," and that Kant was right to compare it to the turning produced by Copernicus in astronomy.

 Magee wrote, "Because of the fundamental character of these problems [unearthed by Kant], and because Kant did not solve them, confronting them has been the most important challenge to philosophy ever since."

However well expressed it may be, I don't believe that. My respect for the decedent's memory does not compel me to silence on this point. The  problems supposedly unearthed by Kant were distinctive consequences of a road down which Descartes and Leibniz had steered the thinkers of the continent of Europe. Having been lulled to sleep by the rationalists, Kant then had to be given a rude awakening by Hume, and then he had to excogitate on why he should be allowed to go back to sleep.

 The tradition that produced Hume, meanwhile, carried on, and produced in due course William James and this humble blog as well.

 Magee also wrote that human "everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous, and yet mysterious and extraordinary."

 Now that strikes me as a good line.

 RIP. 

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  1. HenryJuly 28, 2019 at 7:45 AM

    My favorite book of Magee's was The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. It is a superb introduction. But, remarkably, Magee, if I recall, was a Schopenhauerian. He actually believed that there is a noumenon behind the phenomena that we experience. But he thought that Kant was wrong that there are noumena and that Schopenhauer was right that there is only a single noumenon.

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