Philosopher A Kind Of Life

Philosopher A Kind Of Life

by Ted Honderich (Author), Prof Ted Honderich (Author)

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?

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 472
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 01 Feb 2002

ISBN 10: 0415276314
ISBN 13: 9780415276313

Media Reviews
Of all lives, the inner life of a philosopher is the hardest to capture on the page ... Ted Honderich has done the job.
- The London Times
... a triumph ... a public thinker with rich inner and private lives and no compunction about making himself vulnerable ... thrilling, intellectually fraught.
- The Guardian
... rough-hewn alpha male in the academic world, whose record of boozing, schmoozing and womanizing stands almost scandalously proud of the philosophical pack.
- The Journal of Consciousness Studies
... an unusual book ... just what academic and philosophical life was like in the second half of the 20th Century.
- The Spectator
... brutally honest self-portrait of a man whose passion for ideas and good-looking women has burned unabated.
- The Financial Times