Philosopher: A kind of life - Hardcover

Ted Honderich

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415236975 ISBN 13: 9780415236973

Publisher: Routledge, 2000

Synopsis

The story of Ted Honderich, philosopher, a story of a perilous philosophical life, marked by critical examination, and a compelling personal life full of human drama. This is the story of Ted Honderich's perilous progress from boyhood in Canada to the Grote Professorship of Mind and Logic at University College London, A. J. Ayer's chair. It is compelling, candid and revealing about the beginning and the goal, and everything in between: early work as a journalist on The Toronto Star, travels with Elvis Presley, arrival in Britain, loves and friendships, academic rivalries and battles, marriages and affairs, self-interest and empathy. It sets out resolutely to explain how and why it all happened.

It is as much a narrative of Ted Honderich's philosophy. He makes hard problems real. Philosophy from consciousness and determinism to political violence and democracy comes into sharp focus.

Along the way, questions keep coming up. Does the free marriage owe anything to the analytic philosophy? What are the costs of truth? Are the politics of England slowly making it an ever-better place? Is an action's rightness independent of the mixture of motives out of which it came?

About this title

Review:

"This is an unusual book, by an unusual man ... In decades to come it will be invaluable to historians and indeed to anyone who wants to know just what academic and philosophical life was like in the second half of the 20th Century, as seen from the perspective of one who was very much part of it, but without losing any of his striking and forceful personality."
- Anthony O'Hear, "The Spectator
"This is an excellent book...a significant contribution to the cultural and social history of the last half-century."
-Alasdair MacIntyre
"Honderich's experiment, at once theoretical and literary, is without doubt a success, for the reader is led to follow this man's human and intellectual fortunes with the degree of interest normally inspired by a novel... The person one has the impression of having got to know by the end of the book is not lacking in defects, but certainly evokes sympathy for the way he has avoided putting himself on a pedestal."
-Mario Ricciardi, "Il Sole Ventiquattrore
..."a tale worth telling, and a tale worth reading."
-"Radical Philosophy
"This will appeal to all those fascinated by the inner life of a philosopher."
-"Good Books Guide

From the Publisher:

A book about and by a Grote Professor, Hopeful Lover, Talker, Adversary, Truth-Teller -- and Philosopher. And also about his kind or sort of university academic. "This is now a place where I am alone, a small room of recesses and bays, bright at the window. It is made calm by the green palisade of trees against the sky at the bottom of the gardens, a backdrop waiting for the rest of the play. ... In a recess, a framed announcement recalling my inaugural lecture, 'The Mind, Neuroscience, and Life-Hopes', not certain to escape the eye of a visitor rightly seated. ... How do I and my kind get to places like this? What explains the rest of what needs saying of me in this green summer -- about my philosophical commitments and tendencies, my daily round, and my inner life?"

Ted Honderich was born in the 1930's of a religious mother and a sceptical father in a slow Canadian village. Their morality did not paralyse him, but did keep him from acting on his inclination to girls, by whom he was always taken. He thought about things, and did not fail to fight sometimes. It helped him hold up his end with Elvis Presley, with whom he travelled for a while.

In time for 2000, now the holder of A. J. Ayer's illustrious chair at University College London and a figure on the Hampstead scene, the Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic took time out from another divorce, another court-case, and from trying to discover the nature of consciousness for another book. He sat down to lay out his kind of life and explain it.

Not of another known academic and philosophical kind: "Mates early and once, stays out of trouble, thinks there's something in Wittgenstein, Senior Lecturer."

This book gets a special kind of intellectual and other existence into the clearest focus, by the very best means. This is clarifying and telling the truth about a real and warm-blooded example of the thing. The kind of life has philosophy in it, and philosophy is not at all left out of the story. It is made clear by a real teacher. Determinism and free will, equality, political violence, sense-perception, brain and mind, consciousness.

"What has happened so far in my life, it can be said, is that after awakening in clear philosophy in Hume's tradition, I engaged in it, lived with six women and had large hopes about others, made enemies and friends partly by being a kind of activist with respect to more things than my self-interest, and got ahead in my world. The restrained philosophy alternated with the libertarianism or dissoluteness, the assorted relationships made, and the diligence rewarded."

Ted Honderich's progress through academic battles and philosophical problems, in seminar rooms and courtrooms, through passions and relationships, means and ends, with postgraduates and publishers, and into less political innocence, is told with sharp and engaging frankness. Justice is done, funnily, to a good cast of characters.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0415236975
• ISBN 13: 9780415236973
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 451