As revealed by Confessions and three volumes of memoirs, Magee’s life was as rich and varied as his writing.īorn in 1930 to an East End shopkeeping family, he won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital and then attended Keble College, Oxford, where he took degrees in history and in philosophy, politics and economics, and became president of the Union. But it’s not just this timeless body of work that makes him so fascinating. When Magee died in July 2019, aged 89, he left 22 books to posterity, ranging from poetry, travel and fiction to acclaimed works on Wagner and Schopenhauer. Far from being a fusty academic discipline with no relevance to the ‘real’ world, philosophy was, for him, an existential matter of immediate importance. Magee spent the rest of his life like this, wrestling with the mysteries inherent in everyday experience. Try as he might, he can never experience himself crossing the threshold from wakefulness into unconsciousness, a conundrum that keeps him in a state of ‘active mystification’. A history of western philosophy told through the story of the author’s relationship with it, it opens with a three- or four-year old Magee trying to catch himself falling asleep every night. When I was a philosophy student at King’s College London in my early twenties, I came across a book called Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee.
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