Philosopher A Kind Of Life - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Prof Ted Honderich, Ted Honderich

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'Philosopher, academic, not much more than middle-sized, seeking culmination in mate, can think, likes things clear, mostly stands up for himself, feelingful, moralistic, not a prisoner of convention, not Conservative, imperfectly rational, hopeful.'

This is the story of Ted Honderich and his kind. It is a story of philosophy in a life and a life in philosophy. It is the story of a life sometimes awry, but in the thick of it all and full of love. Getting a logical hold on large things early in the morning, and some white wine in the evening. With his philosophy goes rivalry and troubled academic relationships and a personal life of friendships, marriages and affairs.

Aus dem Klappentext

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 to 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 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?

Philosopher sets brave new standards for the telling of a life. It is not filtered, veiled or varnished. It contains desire, hurt and drama.

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The narrow street takes its short way down from St. John's Church at the top, cream and upstanding, to the shops and Hampstead Heath at the bottom. The street is still quiet enough, save for the morning cars. Its cited charm has not been too much touched by garden designers and by the determination of new residents to floodlight their Regency stucco, for purposes of night security as they say. Once Albion Grove, it now has a name not writ in water, Keats's. In it, when it was a village path, he wrote and lived a part of his brief life, the best part and some of the rest. The nightingale in the garden, other odes, beauty and truth, love of Fanny, the drop of blood on the pillow, and the parting. I pedal past his house each morning to the other place of my life. Down the hill through Belsize Park, Chalk Farm, Primrose Hill, Camden Town and Euston, to Bloomsbury and my other room.

It too can seem closer to being my life than just a setting of it, closer to being the stuff of my life than just a principal location of it. Can there be some sense in this, some plain truth, some actual philosophy, even some English philosophy, not only fancy and feeling?

The room is one of pride and success, history, work, many lectures and papers, fewer pleasures, argument in good temper and bad, strategies and alliances, beginnings and endings of careers, hurt and sad drama. The hurt and sad drama was also a stabbing, some say. It is of a size owed to the good opinion that was had, by himself and others, of an earlier and larger Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London. A. J. Ayer, Professor Sir Alfred, Freddie, known to me in all those roles, all attacked with practiced panache. In the first, he wrote the book Language, Truth and Logic. It inspired my retorts to teachers of my late boyhood who tried to lead me into deep thinking and high feeling. Along with the decency of the Welfare State, which lingers on far less well, and placenames, and the lure of a past, and not much susceptibility to the American way of life, the book brought me to England.

University College London, as resistant to the inclusion of a comma in its name as The Studio is to the loss of its definite article, stands as firmly and as godlessly in Gower St. as it did in 1828, when it first set out to awaken Oxford and Cambridge from their dogmatic slumbers. It was the original University of London. Its Corinthian portico and measured dome, partly paid for by the worthy Grote, welcomed atheists, Dissenters, Catholics, Utilitarians, Jews, women, and other lower orders. It was a breath of fresh air. It still is, despite being effectively a university itself, with some thousands of students and with a good sense of its achievements and of the worth of respectability. Such too was Jeremy Bentham himself, its presiding spirit and household god. The great Utilitarian had self-regard, presumably even more than Freddie. His auto-icon, which is to say his mummified skeleton, remains with us in a college cloister, according to his instructions. The beadles unlock his box to tourists with some gravity.

My room is away from the portico and dome, on the other side of the college, in Gordon Square, where blue plaques recall the Bloomsbury past. In particular those Stracheys, Bells, Carringtons, Morrells and Woolfs, not quite immortal, officially committed to the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. The room, L-shaped and well suited to a worthy Victorian, is all of the first floor of the house of the philosophers of the college, my colleagues, the Department of Philosophy. Six floors of Lecturers, Senior Lecturers and Readers, working their way down from the attic or up from the basement by patience and publications.

In the settled scheme of things, the room is both the Grote's own study and teaching room and also a place for other lectures, seminars and meetings. Thus it welcomes visiting philosophers, up from Oxford to do a turn on this metropolitan stage, or in from Berkeley to bring confident news of California and the future. The ring of soft armchairs and sofa, now green, has behind it rows of upright and serviceable chairs, 45 of them. Undergraduates or postgraduates hear about and may in thought find themselves in only the company of time and space, causation, possible worlds, the redundancy theory of truth, modal logic, mind and brain, and functionalism. Also scepticism, moral realism, the values of art, the rationality of the Free Market, what it is like to be a bat, and, once in a long while, the proprietary doctrines of Aristotle, Kant and other greats of the past. No longer, I am pleased to say, Freud's theory of sexuality, which, after an extended appearance, slipped off the curriculum.

The rest of life comes to a stop for a while as various propositions are laid out and turned over by me or by the visitors, or by my departmental colleagues when they book my room in the hope that their own smaller rooms will be insufficient for their audience. But the room has long had another part to play in our lives as well. Here we have had our Departmental Meetings, occasions for the sharing out of labours, the gathering of opinions on undergraduates, and the massed interviewing of candidates for lectureships. Who is to join us and who not? Very serious matter. Here too the Headship of the department has been our unofficial or official subject. That was the hurt and the sad drama, maybe a stabbing.