Bryan Magee

Karl Popper has been hailed as the greatest philosopher of all time and as a thinker whose influence is ackowledged by a variety of scholars. This work demonstrates Popper's importance across the whole range of philosophy and provides an introduction to the main themes of philosophy itself.

In this infectiously exciting book, Bryan Magee tells the story of his own discovery of philosophy and not only makes it come alive but shows its relevance to daily life. Magee is the Carl Sagan of philosophy, the great popularizer of the subject, and author of a major new introductory history, The Story of Philosophy. Confessions follows the course of Magee's life, exploring philosophers and ideas as he himself encountered them, introducing all the great figures and their ideas, from the pre-Socratics to Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, including Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, rationalism, utilitarianism, empiricism, and existentialism.

Now updated and with a fresh new look, the highly successful "The Story of Philosophy" traces more than 2,500 years of Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece to Saint Augustine and medieval philosophy, the golden century of German philosophy, Bertrand Russell and Albert Camus of the modern era, and much more.World-renowned philosopher and professor Bryan Magee expertly guides your exploration through the major philosophical issues, the important questions, and the key contributions of the great philosophers in this illustrated, accessible guide. Discover the great thinkers in their historical contexts and learn the influences that shaped their lives and work. Each philosophical movement includes profiles of key philosophers and their important works, historical contexts and influences, important quotes, and other related people and ideas. Full-color photographs, artworks, and illustrations illuminate every page."The Story of Philosophy" gives you the information you need to think about life's greatest questions, opening up the world of philosophical ideas in a way that can be easily understood by students and by anyone fascinated by the ways we form our social, political, and ethical ideas.

Beginning with the death of Socrates in 399 BC, and following the story through the centuries to recent figures such as Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, Bryan Magee's conversations with 15 contemporary writers and philosophers provide an account of Western philosophy and its greatest thinkers. The contributors include A.J. Ayer, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, and John Searle, so that the book is not only an introduction to the philosophers of the past, but gives an insight into the view and personalities of some of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

Richard Wagner's devotees have ranged from the subtlest minds (Proust) to the most brutal (Hitler). The enduring fascination with his works arises not only from his singular fusion of musical innovation and theatrical daring, but also from his largely overlooked engagement with the boldest investigations of modern philosophy. In this radically clarifying book, Bryan Magee traces Wagner's intellectual quests, from his youthful embrace of revolutionary socialism to the near-Buddhist resignation of his final years. Magee shows how abstract thought can permeate music and stimulate creations of great power and beauty. And he unflinchingly confronts the Wagner whose paranoia, egocentricity, and anti-Semitism are as repugnant as his achievements are glorious.At once a biography of the composer, an overview of his times, and an exploration of the intellectual and technical aspects of music, Magee's lucid study offers the best explanation of W. H. Auden's judgment that Wagner, for all his notoriety, was "perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived."

This is a revised and enlarged version of Bryan Magee's widely praised study of Schopenhauer, the most comprehensive book on this great philosopher. It contains a brief biography of Schopenhauer, a systematic exposition of his thought, and a critical discussion of the problems to which it gives rise and of its influence on a wide range of thinkers and artists. For this new edition Magee has added three new chapters and made many minor revisions and corrections throughout. This new edition will consolidate the book's standing as the definitive study of Schopenhauer.

How to live meaningfully in the face of the unknowableWe human beings had no say in existing―we just opened our eyes and found ourselves here. We have a fundamental need to understand who we are and the world we live in. Reason takes us a long way, but mystery remains. When our minds and senses are baffled, faith can seem justified―but faith is not knowledge. In Ultimate Questions , acclaimed philosopher Bryan Magee provocatively argues that we have no way of fathoming our own natures or finding definitive answers to the big questions we all face.With eloquence and grace, Magee urges us to be the mapmakers of what is intelligible, and to identify the boundaries of meaningfulness. He traces this tradition of thought to his chief philosophical mentors―Locke, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer―and shows why this approach to the enigma of existence can enrich our lives and transform our understanding of the human predicament. As Magee puts it, "There is a world of difference between being lost in the daylight and being lost in the dark."The crowning achievement to a distinguished philosophical career, Ultimate Questions is a deeply personal meditation on the meaning of life and the ways we should live and face death.

مردان اندیشه پدیدآورندگان فلسفه معاصرMen of Idea: Creators of Contemporary Philosophyپیشگفتار براین مگی، مقدمه ای بر فلسفه گفتگو با آیزایا برلین، فلسفه مارکسیستی گفتگو با چارلز تیلر، مارکوزه و مکتب فرانکفورت گفتگو با هربرت مارکوزه، هایدگر و فلسفه ی جدید اصالت وجود گفتگو با ویلیام برت، دو فلسفه ویتگنشتاین گفتگو با آنتونی کوئین تن، پوزیتیویسم منطقی و میراث آن گفتگو با ا.ج. ایر، افسون فلسفه تحلیل زبان گفتگو با برنارد ویلیامز، فلسفه اخلاق گفتگو با ر.م. هر، اندیشه های کوآین گفتگو با و.و. کوآین، فلسفه زبان گفتگو با جان سرل، اندیشه های چومسکی گفتگو با نوام چومسکی، فلسفه علم گفتگو با هیلری پاتنام، فلسفه و سیاست گفتگو با رانلد دورکین، فلسفه و ادبیات گفتگو با آیریس مرداک، متن اجتماعی فلسفه گفتگو با ارنست گلنر، نظری عمومی به فلسفه در غرب گفتگو با الن مونته فیوره، فهرست راهنما

Many music lovers find Wagner's operas inexpressibly beautiful and richly satisfying, while others find them revolting, dangerous, self-indulgent, and immoral. The man who W.H. Auden once called "perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived" has inspired both greater adulation and greater loathing than any other composer.Bryan Magee presents a penetrating analysis of Wagner's work, concentrating on how his sensational and deeply erotic music uniquely expresses the repressed and highly charged contents of the psyche. He examines not only Wagner's music and detailed stage directions but also the prose works in which he formulated his ideas, as well as shedding new light on his anti-semitism and the way in which the Nazis twisted his theories to suit their own purposes. Outlining the astonishing range and depth of Wagner's influence on our culture, Magee reveals how profoundly he continues to shock and inspire musicians, poets, novelists, painters, philosophers, and politicians today.

The Story of The Essential Guide to the History of Western Philosophy (Paperback) The Story of Thought packs a lot of information into a manageably-sized book. Magee does a great job of balancing the various aspects of the history of philosophy that may be of interest to different readers. Each philosopher is covered in a section of a few pages outlining the thinker's major ideas, but also containing sidebars with famous quotes, major works, related topics and historical notes. The book is organized chronologically and philosophers are grouped into intellectual movements, introduced and expanded by insets. This format allows the book to be used as a point reference on a single thinker or school of thought, but also reads well from cover to cover as the "story of thought". If you are looking for a good introduction to philosophy, it would be hard to find a more complete, accessible, and universally appealing resource.

Hoxton today is one of the most fashionable parts of inner London, yet before the Blitz, it was the capital's most notorious slum area. It was London's busiest market for stolen goods, the centre of the pickpocket trade, home to a razor gang that terrorised racecourses all over southern England. Its main thoroughfare, Hoxton Street, was known also as the roughest street in Britain.But among the people born there in its heyday was Bryan Magee, journalist, academic, philosopher, radio and television broadcaster and Member of Parliament. For him it was home, for his first nine years, until he became an evacuee on the outbreak of war. In this moving and beautifully written book he recalls the vanished world of his childhood and brings it to life again in all its drama and surprise.

This utterely compelling memoir opens with a sceptical nine-year-old Bryan Magee being taught the facts of life. It goes on to tell the story of the Second World War as seen through a child's eyes.Growing Up in a War nostalgically evokes the atmostphere of wartime England, the community spirit of a society before television, where very few had cars or telephones. A kid from the East End, he won a scholarship to one of the country's ancient public schools. During the school holidays, he returned to London and the air raids, the doodlebugs and V2 rockets.With the war over, Bryan's school sent him to a Lyc�e in Versailles, and he explored the Paris of those post-war years. Then, back in England, he tumbled into his first love affair. The book comes to an end with his call-up into the army, and his unexpected posting to the School of Military Intelligence.Growing Up in a War is a stunning autobiography and account of Britain during an extraordinary period of history, by the winner of the J.R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography.

The third instalment of Bryan Magee's memoirs picks up where Growing Up in a War ends, with his going up to Oxford as an undergraduate after the Second World War. Through the love affairs, extraordinary friendships and the heady intellectual atmosphere of Oxford in the 1940s and '50s, the fame of the '60s and the political turmoil of Britain in the '80s, Making the Most of It is a fascinating, deeply personal journey through the 20th century. The first volume of his memoirs, Clouds of Glory: A Hoxton Childhood, won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography.

First published in 1974. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

For three centuries, philosophers have held that knowledge derives from experience. If so, it may be possible that blind people, lacking an important component of experience--visual perception--know the world in ways that differ from the rest of us. Curious about this possibility, the noted philosopher, author, and BBC host Bryan Magee began to correspond with Martin Milligan, Dean of the Philosophy Department at the University of Leeds, and himself blind nearly since birth. On Blindness presents their fascinating letters to each other, letters which, as Magee notes, soon "hared off" in unforeseen directions, to delve not only into philosophical questions of perception, but also into the day-to-day differences between blind and sighted people and how these differences define their respective worlds. Through these letters, the reader eavesdrops on two brilliant thinkers as they wrestle with important philosophical issues and discuss everything from how to convey the stunning visual beauty of a flamingo-covered African lake, to tasting the "brownness" of coffee, to defining sight as "feeling from a distance," to Milligan's description of his own dreams and their significance. Much of this dialogue is quite thought-provoking, such as Milligan's assertion that people blind from birth do not "live in a world of darkness," that they don't even have a sense of what darkness is, nor would many of them want their sight restored. And at times the exchanges become rather heated, as when Milligan makes the philosophical argument that "knowing" and "knowing that" are essentially the same, that all knowledge is propositional knowledge--an assertion that Magee finds anathema. Likewise, when Magee claims that differences between the sighted and the blind "can only be described as vast," Milligan (who had fought prejudice against the blind all his life) sends back a passionate rebuttal. Here in the course of their wide ranging correspondence, Magee and Milligan probe the limits of what can be known, or expressed, or understood, shedding much light on the writings of such thinkers as Kant, Russell, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein, among others. And as they do so, they also bring their readers closer to understanding what divides the blind and the sighted--and what brings them both together in the struggle to understand the world.

An intensely personal discussion of what it means to the lack the sense of sight. Sight unseen opens the eyes of the sighted to the world as experienced by the blind. What begins as a philosophical exchange between the noted philosopher and broadcaster Bryan Magee and the late Martin Milligan, activist and philosopher , blind almost from birth, develops into a personal and intense discussion of the implications of blindness.

Tag along with Mick and Finn on amazing adventures.

One in Twenty A Study of Homosexuality in Men and Women

"Alle mennesker streber ifølge sin natur etter å vite" - AristotelesVåre forestillinger om sentrale begreper som erfaring, handling, demokrati og samfunn går tilbake til antikkens greske filosofer. Denne boken gir en grundig og lettfattelig oversikt over den vestlige filosofihistorien frå antikken, gjennom middelalderen, renessansen og frem til vår egen tid.Med innsiktsfulle tekster, fargerike illustrasjoner og stort mangfold tar forfatteren oss med på en ferd gjennom sentrale temaer og viktige spørsmål som filosofien har berørt. Bryan Magee redegjør for de store filosofene fra Sokrates til Popper. Underveis presenterer han tenkere som Augustin, Locke og Nietzsche, og åpner for ideenes verden på ein måte som er forståelig for alle.Boken er et sentralt verk for alle som er opptatt av de evige menneskelige spørsmål.

Originally written and published in Britain under the aegis of the covert Information Research Department of British Intelligence, these now classic books are characterized by their politically moderate defense of advanced capitalism.

To live in danger

2500 ans de philosophie occidentale, de la Grèce antique à nos jours : un magistral panorama. Dans notre monde moderne à la recherche de ses valeurs, qui n'est pas, un jour où l'autre, confronté aux grandes questions de l'existence ? Dieu, l'âme, la mort, le sens de la vie, la place de l'homme dans l'univers... Ces questions n'ont cessé d'agiter, d'animer la philosophie occidentale, mais comment s'y retrouver dans les méandres de ses différentes écoles ?S'adressant aussi bien aux non-initiés qu'aux étudiants désireux de clarifier leur connaissance des grands courants philosophiques, cet ouvrage richement illustré est une brillante anthologie de la pensée occidentale. De Platon à Bergson en passant par Saint-Augustin ou Nietzsche, on y trouve les réponses aux grandes questions, les mots-clés et les axes de réflexion des différentes écoles.

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