Review of “Confessions of a Philosopher” by Bryan Magee – A History of Western Philosophy & Its Influence

Bryan Magee’s career has included producing highly intellectual television programs for the BBC as well as teaching philosophy at Oxford. He writes that his true love is philosophy, but he also had to earn a living. This book is couched in a biographical framework, but the author explains its actual aim is to explicate the teachings of many of the world’s great philosophers. Thus, while he tells the story of how he came to be so invested in philosophy, he also explores, in an entertaining and accessible way, the ideas of many great philosophers throughout western history.

Magee learned much of his knowledge of philosophy [that field of study that addresses questions about life, existence, and the universe, inter alia] as a student at Oxford, but a primary thrust of the book is to discredit what he calls “Oxford Philosophy.” He avers that philosophy at Oxford veered away from the most important issues of the field (in his view, understanding the real world) and emphasized epistemology at the expense of ontology.

[Both epistemology and ontology are branches of philosophy. Ontology asks what does really exist, while epistemology is concerned with the question of how you come to believe what you know. While they are related, they generate entirely different emphases for study. Ontologists might ask, “Is there a God?” whereas epistemologists look at how and why people have come to their particular beliefs about God.]

Statue of Plato, Credit: vasiliki / Getty Images

The book traces the development of western philosophy from the pre-Socratics through Plato (whom he rates as one of the two greatest philosophers); through the Middle Ages; to the English empiricists including Immanuel Kant (the other greatest philosopher in his judgment) and Schopenhauer; to Bertrand Russell and his epigones; and finally to Karl Popper.

In Magee’s view, Bertrand Russell did such an excellent job of analyzing the use of the role of language in formulating philosophical propositions that his followers lost sight of what should be the true goal of philosophy and identified language analysis as the entirety of the field. It is certainly a tempting, not to mention, productive focus for philosophy, as well as for Biblical and constitutional exegesis: language is not only about grammar and vocabulary, which can supply their own ambiguities. It is also about nuance and culture, values and perceptions, and local and contemporary references that may supply entirely different meanings of words in different contexts. But to this author, language parsing should only be a subsection of philosophical analysis.

As for Kant, to Magee his greatness lay in his distinction between the noumenal (the thing in “itself”) and the phenomenal (what can be perceived about the thing). What we, as humans, can perceive about anything is limited by our sense detectors, as enhanced by any clever sense-extending technology we are able to develop. We simply do not know whether there is anything else or any quality of a thing that we cannot detect. So the actual thing in itself is forever hidden from us. We can know only its qualities or characteristics subject to our sensory detectors.

Portrait of Immanuel Kant by Johann Gottlieb Becker, 1768, via Wikipedia

Magee actually met Russell several times and knew Popper pretty well. He asserts that Russell was a superb analyst, but he never claimed philosophy did not extend beyond mere analysis as many later Oxford philosophers contended. Popper’s major contribution to our understanding, according to Magee, was his analysis of the process of induction; he agreed with Hume that one could never prove the truth of a proposition about the state of the world. However, Popper argued that induction was still very useful because under the principle of falsifiability it could demonstrate the falsity of a proposition by finding just one inconsistency. Popper also believed we might approach the truth asymptotically through induction. [The asymptotic philosopher is one who aims to come as close as possible to explaining the world in spite of our human limitations. It comes from the mathematical concept of approaching increasingly closer to knowing a particular value or line without ever reaching it.]

Magee concludes that we cannot know the nature of total reality, but we have difficulty in accepting this situation. As to moral judgments, he says “we can no more prove that our moral convictions are valid than we can prove that the rules of logic are valid, just as we cannot prove that there is a reality external to ourselves.” Instead, our aim “should be, not to prove anything, but to find out, and properly to understand, what the truth is about what is.”

Evaluation: Magee very competently explicates the theories of various philosophers. His biographical interludes provide a little respite from some very dense and arcane analysis. This book is well worth reading, but will be better appreciated by readers with some background in western philosophy

Rating: 4.5/5

Published by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, 1997