Skip to main content

Bryan Magee, RIP

Image result for Bryan Magee

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. 

Labels:

Comments

  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.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
25 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
11 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more