Bøger af Bryan Magee

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, "e;There is a world of difference between being lost in the daylight and being lost in the dark."e;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.

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.

'Philosopher, politician, novelist, television interviewer, MP, and music and drama critic, Magee is a man of many parts. But his star role [...] is that of autobiographer.'Francis King, SpectatorIn this final volume of his autobiography Bryan Magee completes his story with his customary candour and clarity. He takes up the thread as an undergraduate in Oxford, where he has his biggest love affair, publishes a volume of poems, takes two degrees, and is elected President of the Oxford Union. Within three years of going down he has lived in Sweden and the United States (countries that he has visited regularly all his life), and has written his second book, Go West, Young Man.At the heart of Making the Most of It is Magee's harrowing account of what he has called 'a fairly disastrous period of my life' - his relationship with Ingrid Söderlund, whom he married after she became pregnant with their daughter Gunnela. The marriage soon ended, but Magee's Swedish family - now not only a daughter, but three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren - have always been central to his life.Writing books has been Magee's chief priority and preoccupation. His major achievement as an author has been to make philosophy more widely accessible, and to produce two outstanding books on Wagner, in addition to his famous book on Schopenhauer. These books have been well reviewed, but their sales were not sufficient to pay for a life in central London, with its superabundance of theatre, music and social life - all leading passions of his. So he also earned money elsewhere. He began by becoming a fully trained brewer with Guinness, but then moved into the making of television programmes, and also produced more and more criticism of theatre and music. He made a name for himself in philosophy, and was a visiting professor at universities in Britain and abroad. For ten years he was a Member of Parliament. All these occupations have added their colour to his life and to this narrative.

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."

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. In The Story of Philosophy, Revised and Updated, 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, Revised and Updated 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.

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.

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 Lycee in Versailles, and he explored the Paris of those post-war years.

Wagner was one of the few major composers who studied philosophy seriously. Bryan Magee places the composer's artistic development in the context of the philosophy of his age, and gives us the first detailed and comprehensive study of the close links between Wagner and the philosophers - from the pre-Marxist socialists to Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. Magee explores the relationship between words and music, between the conscious and the unconscious mind, between art and philosophy. It tackles soberly and judiciously the Wagner whose paranoia, egocentricity and anti-semitism are repugnant, as well as the Wagner of artistic genius. The resulting text illuminates Wagner and the music-dramas in altogether new ways.

An extremely readable introduction to philosophy told through experiences of everyday life by one of our best popularisers of philosophy.

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.

An analysis of Wagner, his music, stage directions, prose and his influence on the culture of our age, with a discussion of the reasons for the reactions his work has provoked. Magee sheds light on Wagner's anti-semitic ideas and the way these were used by the Nazis for their own ends.