Librum 2008-07-30

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

How do people become professional philosophers? Why are some so strongly compelled by the analytic (philosophy of language) tradition in philosophy? It is these questions that CM illuminates in his brief but very readable 'intellectual' memoir. If these questions don't interest you -- as it appears they did not interest certain reviewers on this page -- don't bother reading TMoaP. If they do, read on. You're sure to be rewarded for the few hours' effort. 4 stars, not 5, only because the rewards -- in my view -- were not as ample as they might have been. By which I mean: I greatly enjoyed reading TMoaP; I only wish it had gone longer and at greater depth into the areas of CM's philosophical interest. Guess I'll have to give CM's 'serious' philosophy a read sometime. TMoaP succeeds on two levels: it is an interesting and entertaining memoir, and a spur to further -- and deeper -- reading in philosophy. What more should a reader expect?

S. Mitchell 2008-04-22

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

In his book The Making of a Philosopher, McGinn seamlessly weaves in and out of autobiography and concise explication of the most notable contemporary philosophical concepts with uncanny agility. In doing so, McGinn creates a new and entertaining genus of philosophical writing. Very often, philosophy seems so cold and abstract; almost inhuman. In addition to McGinn's extremely clear treatment of the most notable contemporary philosophical concepts, the Making of a Philosopher defies tradition by putting a human face to such popular contemporary philosophy, from describing Saul Kripke's table manners (p. 66) to David Lewis' driving habits (p. 101) and much, much more.

I happened to stumble across this book just after I graduated from Berkeley, and as it happened, reading it was a great way for me to reflect on and summarize a good deal of material that I was exposed to as an undergraduate. Feeling somewhat burnt out and jaded about philosophy at the time, what sold me on the book initially was the very beginning of the preface (a section of the book that can make or break a purchase for me), "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 didn't want my book to remind the reader of school."

Needless to say, given my current mood at the time, I was sold. I was happy to buy the book too, because I had been meaning to read more of McGinn's work anyway, since I found the few scraps of his work that I had been exposed to exceptionally clear and intriguing. It was a natural purchase for me.

One negative about the book: I do wish that McGinn had taken it upon himself to go into greater detail about his life. To his credit, he does a good job of highlighting the good and the bad, but you finish this book with a sense that McGinn has left out many, many important details about his life. Not that it's that philosophically important, but he fails to mention any of those gritty details that make biographies so interesting--he fails to mention anything about his love life, for example. Before I give too much away, let me just say that biographies in philosophy are extremely rare. If anything, I recommend that anyone remotely interested in the subject should read this book to get a different perspective of philosophy that isn't very common.

ImageMD 2007-11-22

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Ontogeny describes the origin and the development of an organism from the fertilized egg to its mature form. Ontology is the philosophic study of being or existence. Colin McGinn takes the reader on a ontogenic journey from his youth in a mining town in northeast England to his arrival as a Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. His journey takes us through his choice of philosophy as a career, his personal philosophic questions, his answers (or non-answers), his initial rejection and later rise in prominence at Oxford University. We can sense his existential questions as he tries to apply the philosophy he teaches, the questions of ontology, epistomology, free will, fate and luck, to his own life. This personal history is very engaging and serves to humanize the scholar and soften the aloofness and arrogance we usually associate with a world class academic.

jose.r-s 2007-05-28

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

I learned about McGinn via the work of Jerry Fodor. "The Making of a Philosopher" was the first book I read from him. This book is a rather good portrait of the intellectual development of a person. It is fascinating to see how his interests in philosophy develop and the persons involved. The book has the additional benefit of containing philosophical explanations that are short, to the point and clear.
McGinn also comes across as a very likable chap, unlike some of the pompous gits one finds frequently in philosophy (for a sample of these individuals just take a look at the reviews in this page).

ctdreyer 2004-05-06

9 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

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.