About the book
Part memoir and part study, Colin McGinn's account follows his intellectual life from his early years in England, when he read Anselm and Descartes, to his move to the United States, first to Los Angeles and then to New York. He offers a contemporary academic reading of major twentieth-century philosophers, among them Noam Chomsky, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell. Alongside the ideas come stories of the teachers who shaped his thinking and often became his friends and mentors, A. J. Ayer at Oxford above all. The result is a self-portrait of a mind developing over a life spent on both sides of the Atlantic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb called it a great book but admitted it left him feeling cold, comparing McGinn's handling of abstract concepts to a plumber fitting pipes together.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Flaneur)
This is a great book but I felt something cold inside of me while reading it. I don't know if it is cultural (the modern English philosopher's fear of displaying passion) but I had the feeling to talk to a plumber who developed expertise in abstract concepts and their relationships just as if they were small plumbing problems fitting together under a generalized plumbing theory. Perhaps philosophy needs to be treated like that, just like engineering --but not for me. At least I give myself the illusion of doing something more...literary.
Colin McGINN teaches us that we need nevertheless to master the art of clarity of both thought and exposition. He write with perfect clarity: a clear, unburdened, unaffected, UnFrench UnGerman philosophical prose.
The book has a presentation of the Kripke idea of naming as necessity of such clarity that I felt actually smart reading it.
Other than that there is the feeling of drabness in part of the book of the type I got once at a conference in an industrial city West of London.
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