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The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy

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"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."--Socrates

All too often, philosophers write in an arcane, esoteric language baffling to laypersons untrained in the discipline. The layperson's reaction to reading such perceived mumbo-jumbo is typically "Say what?" or "So what?"

In The Making of a Philosopher, Colin McGinn seeks to rescue philosophy from its ivory tower, bring it down to earth, and explain it in an accessible, engaging way. He is only partially successful; some sections of his book remain tough sledding.

McGinn, 52, was born in West Hartlepool, county Durham, a small mining town in the northeast of England. He was educated at the Univ. of Manchester and Oxford Univ. He now lives in New York City and is a Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers.

An analytical philosopher dealing with language and logic, McGinn traces his philosophical lineage from Plato and Aristotle, through Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant, to Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein--a tradition that emphasizes clarity, rigor, argument, theory, and truth.

"It is not a tradition," he writes, "that aims primarily for inspiration or consolation or ideology. Nor is it particurlary concerned with 'philosophy of life"--though parts of it are. This kind of philosophy is more like science than religion, more like mathematics than poetry--though it is neither science nor mathematics."

As an academic philosopher, McGinn has been interested mainly in epistemology, linguistic analysis, and cognitive science. Alas, in The Making of a Philosopher, he does not even mention my two favorite philosophers, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, nor does he deal with Eastern philosophy, other representatives of Continental philosophy, or post-modern philosophy.

McGinn is probably best known as the author of a provocative essay, "Can the Mind-Body Problem Be Solved?" (which is by far the most cited, reprinted, and translated paper he has ever written). His answer to this question is no. "We aren't god, after all," he writes; "we are recently evolved organisms made of pretty low-tech materials. Our human intelligence is not cut out for the job" [of solving such knotty problems.

"Maybe the human species cannot be expected to understand," he writes, "how the universe contains mind and matter in combination. Isn't it really a preposterous overconfidence on our part to think that our species--so recent, so contingent, so limited in many ways--can nevertheless unlock every secret of the natural world?"

In my opinion, the "linguistic turn" that characterized 20th-century philosophy was unfortunate, leading to a dry, dreary, and dull wasteland. And, apparently, McGinn himself would agree. After spending many years as an analytic philosopher, he has now turned his energies to connecting philosophical concepts with "real life" and making philosophy accessible to educated laypersons.

In discussing metaphilosophy--the philosophy of philosophy--McGinn points out that philosophy is not an exact science and can never attain the certainty of mathematics or the clarity of logic. The closer we get to philosophy, the more problematical it becomes.

"Philosophy must now be admitted," he writes, "to be a condition of terminal puzzlement, a permanent fretting ignorance." One should not be daunted or discouraged, however, by this insight, for as Socrates always maintained, it is the wise man who knows his own ignorance.

The Making of a Philosopher is a candid work revealing that philosophy can be a passionate and exciting pursuit. Writing with intelligence and humor, the author pulls no punches concerning the strong and weak points of his chosen field. And the narrative flows smoothly: not many academic philosophers can write this well.

Colin McGinn is the author of thirteen previous books, including The Mysterious Flame, The Character of Mind, The Problem of Consciousness, and Ethics, Evil, and Fiction.

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.

On page 222 the author explains his reputation as a tough reviewer of other books. I'd love to imitate him, but cannot avoid giving him five stars, for five reasons.

First, I literally read this book at one sitting - OK lying down on my bed, for four hours 5 minutes, not even one trip to the john. Credit for page-turnability must go to the writing; but also to fine contributions by the editorial and design teams.

Second, accuracy. He describes well the Oxford I knew as a B. Phil (Philosophy) student a few years earlier than him, also from a non-Oxbridge background.

Third, determination. He was not from an academic family, and his first high school did not expect its students to go on to college. But once he got the thinking bug, there was no holding him back.

Fourth, stimulation. This is not a crash-course in philosophy. However, enough is said sufficiently clearly on metaphysics - oddly, a word never mentioned - and on moral philosophy to stir my flaccid philosophical loins.

Fifth, anecdotal warmth. I enjoyed the accounts of philosophers behaving generously or pettily. It's a book that humanizes philosophy. He had his spats with the Oxford establishment - and Rutgers has been the beneficiary

For those with an interest in cross-cultural studies there are nice reminders that driving on the left is not the only habit that Brits need to correct if they want to become good Cis-Atlantic citizens.

I enjoyed reading this from the standpoint of finding out what it might be like to teach and write in the field of philosophy. McGinn was honest about the tedious and rewarding parts of such a career. The author's writing style is clear and unpretentious.

This is a great book but I felt something cold inside of me while reading it. I don't know if it is cultural (the modern English philosopher's fear of displaying passion) but I had the feeling to talk to a plumber who developed expertise in abstract concepts and their relationships just as if they were small plumbing problems fitting together under a generalized plumbing theory. Perhaps philosophy needs to be treated like that, just like engineering --but not for me. At least I give myself the illusion of doing something more...literary.
Colin McGINN teaches us that we need nevertheless to master the art of clarity of both thought and exposition. He write with perfect clarity: a clear, unburdened, unaffected, UnFrench UnGerman philosophical prose.
The book has a presentation of the Kripke idea of naming as necessity of such clarity that I felt actually smart reading it.
Other than that there is the feeling of drabness in part of the book of the type I got once at a conference in an industrial city West of London.

I am currently aspiring to gain a bachelors degree in philosophy and this book is a great way to grasp fundamental theories. I'm becoming more and more interested in field of philosophy that seem so daunting. I'm glad a book like this was written to show the minority of people out there what the trials toward a career in academia and philosophy is really like. (Almost makes me want to transfer to Rutgers.)

The only thing I learned from this book was how great the author thinks he is.