A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

I think the general form of the book may be likened to a composite picture consisting of two images, one superimposed on the other. The first image is our author's account of the course of his life, of what he did at various periods, in so far as his activities and concerns bore on his philosophical development and professional career. 

The other image consists of a presentation of what may be called the Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics, and the contributions made to these difficult topics by a number of important philosophers, including, to be sure, McGinn himself. For McGinn suffers from no false modesty; not a bit of it. He believes he has interesting things to say about a range of philosophical topics and he does not shy away from blowing his trumpet from time to time. To the sub-title of the book My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy he could have added: and how good I have turned out to be!

The narrative of his life reads rather like the intellectual analogue of a rags-to-riches story. Not quite a foundling, the future Professor of Philosophy was born in modest circumstances in 1950 to a working class family in West Hartlepool in County Durham. He moved with his family to Gillingham, Kent where he failed his Eleven Plus, and later he moved to Blackpool where he excelled in sports, developed a love for rock-and-roll and the Mod life-style, but then he came under the influence of the proverbial inspiring teacher who got him interested in books about philosophical matters including that famous philosophical con-job, the Ontological Argument! He went to the University of Manchester ('I was the first McGinn to go to university') to study Psychology with a Philosophy subsidiary and wrote an essay on Mach and Husserl which got published in a scholarly journal when he was 22, before he even completed his M.A. Without a proper philosophical background, he went to Oxford to pursue graduate studies, he enrolled for a B.Litt., but succeeded in getting transferred to the more demanding and prestigious B.Phil. course (McGinn makes quite a bit out of this detail), studied under Strawson and Ayer and some other philosophical Olympians of the period, he won the coveted John Locke Prize, and by the time he earned his B.Phil. (with distinction, naturally), he got a lectureship at University College London. 

Once he commenced an academic career, his intellectual and professional upward mobility greatly accelerated. He turned out in rapid succession books and articles, was promoted to a readership at UCL from which he applied for and was appointed to the Wilde Readership in Mental Philosophy in Oxford a success which soured his relations with some philosophical rivals. McGinn may want his reader to believe that the autobiographical narrative is only meant to provide a formatting of an explanation of philosophy, to give a sense of philosophy as a lived subject, but not infrequently devotes space to bitch about teachers and colleagues who had slighted his abilities. 

Over the years he obtained a number of visiting appointments in the United States which cultivated in him a love for some elements of American culture, including a more imaginative and powerful way of doing philosophy (by comparison to which what went on in Oxford seemed to him provincial and stale), the big Chevrolet Impala which he bought for $400, water sports and video games (yes, our author is not all work and no play). In 1990 he was offered a permanent Professorship at Rutgers University in New Jersey and when Oxford refused his request for a leave of absence without pay, he left for Rutgers in some acrimony, determined never to help Oxford in anything in future. 

By the time The Making of a Philosopher came out, McGinn had spent more than 10 years teaching at Rutgers, living in New York city, discussing philosophy with some of the most distinguished thinkers in the field, and enjoying his playtime. This is the gist of what McGinn wants to say about his life and career to his readers. Judging from his CV, which is still posted on the Rutgers website (even though last spring he moved to another post at the University of Miami to avail himself of water sports all the year round!), the book is preceded by more than a dozen other books and a novel, and more than 100 papers and review articles on the philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics, ethics, philosophical logic, and the theories of literature and cinema. The man has certainly produced a substantial body of work of professional standard and he deserves recognition.

Let us now look briefly at the second component of the book, what I called 'the Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics'. This is a series of discussions of basic philosophical themes which he plants in various chapters where the biographical narrative naturally connects with a philosophical topic. (For example, when McGinn was in his late teens he read a book containing a discussion of the problem of perception, which he now explains in just such a way; in 1974 he had to teach an undergraduate course on truth, and this is how he sees the matter.) 

Several important philosophical problems are given two- to four-page treatments, including: the Ontological Argument, the problem of perception, the relationship between a particular thing and its qualities, realism and anti-realism, the subjective point of view, mental contents, issues in practical ethics, Sartre's distinction between the For-itself and the In-itself, Wittgenstein's insight on language, Chomsky's view on language development, Kripke and Davidson on various questions on meaning and reference, Freud on dreams, and McGinn on several different topics. The writing is light and clear, with just enough detail to show the complexity and interest of the problem and perhaps the line along which a solution may be sought. 

I have read The Making of a Philosopher with pleasure, for it is an entertaining book. Given that, as a philosophy teacher, I have had to read, over the years, many professional books in philosophy including books by McGinn, my motive for reading this one was curiosity to see how this man displays himself, how he comes through his own account of his early life and his student days, his friendships, his grievances, his leisure interests, his reactions to the petty politics of the academia, his bitching and gossiping at the expense of colleagues who annoyed him. 

For me the philosophical component was the excuse for reading about the highs and the lows, the struggles and the pretences, the achievements and the vanities, the insights and the mind-blocks in the life of a philosopher who is good enough to have achieved a good reputation and a respected position in the business, but bad enough to have expended energy and ingenuity to spin out what is in effect a flattering picture of who he is. We shouldn't disdain amour propre or even narcissism, since they are natural and in themselves harmless tendencies in human beings. But we don't need to believe that the products of such tendencies have philosophical value.