McGinn comes across as an engaging and down-to-earth kind of bloke, with few philosophical airs and graces. And so, this is a good read for the non-specialist interested in why a philosopher might want to BE a philosopher in the first place--and spend years pondering, say, why there is something rather than nothing--and he outlines quite vividly the kinds of abstruse questions that have exercised the minds of great thinkers for thousands of years.
McGinn touches upon most of the major strands of what is, I have heard said, crudely called "analytical philosophy," be it language, the meaning of meaning, the mind, the body (where one starts and the other finishes), the Subject, the Object, Phenomena, the Thing-in-Itself, primary and secondary properties, mathematics and logic, ethical judgments, and all that rigmarole. Still, his tone can also be a bit off-putting at times, or at least I found it so; the "isn't it amazing! and me just an ordinary sort of chap!" inflections, ad nauseum, strike the ear as a mite self-satisfied and pompous.
He seems inordinately impressed by status, for instance, of the class kind rather than the intellectual kind--rather too ready to make sarky asides at the expense of the humble working class roots he otherwise celebrates. Is Blackpool really ALL thugs, yobs, and beer-swilling morons? Is Manchester JUST "sodden" and "grey"? And is LA really all palm trees and sunshine and golden beaches, not smog and eternal traffic jams and Mexican gang-bangers? (See how stereotyping that sounds? Well, that's how the Northern English parts in McGinn's book sound to me).
If you have ever been to Manchester--as it is now, if not the 1970s--and also been to Oxford, as it is now, you'd have to concede surely that the latter might have the dons and the quadrangles, but as for what one might call vibrant contemporary culture (music, television, theater, festivals, resident writers at the major universities, physicists, you name it), the "grimy" post-industrial city wins hands-down. (And of course, you can be on The Pleasure Beach in just over an hour, riding the roller-coasters pissed, and going to see "pier-end philosopher" Roy Chubby Brown). We are also subjected to a long stretch of rather clunky prose about just how fierce the competition at Oxford was (is), and thus, as one is obviously expected to come to this conclusion, just how brilliant McGinn must have been (indeed, remains). If he mentions just how many papers he published in well-respected philosophy journals while still "basically a psychologist" once, then he must mention it about twenty times.
McGinn does, to give him his due, do a very good job of making philosophy "accessible" (that is, I think, the preferred word, though one might be tempted to do a spot of logical analysis on the question of whether, as a "signifier," and one so clearly beloved of blurb writers, it actually names anything that might pass for "real" in a text).
So: Do not mistake my meaning here--as Wittgenstein said, language is tricky, especially when it comes to matters of tone and idiom--I did very much enjoy McGinn's book. But, that said, and as my own working class Mancunian mum might have said, he does come across as "a bit full of himself."
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sarahb
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 19, 2013
