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

THE MAKING OF A
PHILOSOPHER

MY JOURNEY THROUGH
TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

C OLIN M CGINN

Contents

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK IS TO EXPLAIN PHILOSOPHY IN AN accessible, engaging way. But how best to do that? After trying out a number of plans for such a book, I hit upon the autobiographical format. More orthodox formats inevitably became too textbooklike, and while there is a place for such books I didnt want my book to remind the reader of school. I realized that what was missing was a sense of philosophy as a lived subjectas part of a flesh-and-blood human life. By placing philosophy in an autobiographical context I could convey the excitement and passion of the subject, as well as its trials. I myself have greatly enjoyed reading other philosophical autobiographies and biographies; I might mention here, in particular, Bertrand Russells Autobiography and Ray Monks biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. However much of a purist I may be about philosophy, there is no denying the drama and realism that come with a more personal approach. In this book, therefore, I make a point of situating the philosophy in its personal context, emphasizing the people, places, and times involved. There is also an element of struggle inherent in living a life of philosophy, and I have tried to bring this out in my own case. The result, I hope, captures the texture of the day-to-day consciousness of a professional philosopher.

I should make it clear that this is not a full autobiography; it is an intellectual autobiography. I therefore mention only those experiences and relationships that bear directly upon my intellectual life. I make no mention of experiences and relationships, however important they may have been, that do not contribute toward a portrait of my philosophical existence. Mostly, this is a book about what has gone on in my mind. I want to stress this because it might be only too easy for my reader to interpret a lack of discussion of extra-philosophical events as a lack of the relevant kinds of events. One stereotype of the philosopher has him or her confined to a lonely room all day, ceaselessly contemplatingas if there were no love or sex in the life of a dedicated philosopher. I grant that the way I describe my life here might confirm this stereotype, since I make no mention of such worldly matters. But, to repeat, the absence of such discussion should not be taken to imply the absence of the relevant kinds of experiencefar from it. I have simply carved out that portion of my life in which philosophy has occupied center stage. There is already enough turmoil and drama there to be mentioned.

The kind of philosophy dealt with in this book is often labeled analytical philosophy. This is really too narrow a label, since what I choose to discuss is not generally a matter of taking a word or concept and analyzing it (whatever exactly that might be). The philosophical tradition of which I am a part begins with Plato and Aristotle, continues through Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, as well as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant, and reaches Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and their recent philosophical descendants. This tradition emphasizes clarity, rigor, argument, theory, truth. It is not a tradition that aims primarily for inspiration or consolation or ideology. Nor is it particularly concerned with philosophy of life, though parts of it are. This kind of philosophy is more like science than religion, more like mathematics than poetrythough it is neither science nor mathematics. So readers in search of a book about eastern philosophy, or Continental philosophy, or post-modern philosophy, will not be rewarded by this one. This is a book about philosophy as it is practiced today in the university philosophy departments of the world and which is now largely the analytical kind of philosophy.

The book is thus about contemporary academic philosophy. What I have aimed to do is present an extended glimpse of this world, so that the reader will come away with an impression of what the genuine article looks like. Some of my discussions may therefore seem tough going, and removed from the concerns of everyday life, but I have tried to make the ideas as clear as possible while doing justice to academic philosophy as it has actually been practiced over the last thirty years. What you get here is what there is. Not that this kind of philosophy is somehow only of interest to those who are paid to practice it; part of my point in this book is that these ideas should be of interest to everyone who is concerned with fundamental questions about reality. As I am at pains to show, I myself was drawn to philosophyirresistibly sosimply by the intrinsic interest of the questions; in a way, it is accidental that I ended up teaching in a university philosophy department.

And let me not give too somber and heavy a picture of what follows. It is not all brow-creasing deep thought; philosophy has its funny side, and its all-too-human side. Philosophers, after all, are human beings too, surprising as that may sound.

Colin McGinn
New York
July 2001