Archive on 4: Bryan Magee - Man of Ideas

I've just been listening to a radio programme about the broadcaster and philosopher Bryan Magee.

He's been blogged about here several times, and I collected most of what I had to say in a post I wrote after he died in 2019. Most notably, he introduced me to the work of Karl Popper and was evacuated to Market Harborough as a boy during the war.

Magee's television series Men of Ideas, in which he interviewed contemporary philosophers about the ideas of the subject's great figures, was broadcast in 1978. (I suspect Angie Hobbs, who made the programme, is younger then I am and watched his later series The Great Philosophers.)

If I remember correctly, I had already applied to study philosophy at university when Men of Ideas began, but was still going for interviews. Whatever the exact chronology, the programmes served as a wonderful introduction to the subject.

Though I went to a comprehensive and received free school meals, I can't say that their patrician tone put me off. In fact it attracted me, because I didn't want university to be just like school.

I can appreciate that others will have thought philosophy wasn't for them after seeing the programmes. And the title Men of Ideas makes me cringe today.

But then 1978 was a different world in philosophy as it was in everything else. In particular, Ludwig Wittgenstein still exerted a powerful influence on many academics. If their papers didn't explicate a remark of his, they certainly began with an epigraph taken from his work.

And Roland Hall, the man who interviewed me for a place at York and gave me a generous offer, had been supervised by J.L. Austin and, during his Army service, served as the clerk to the  the President of the Court during the war crimes trial of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, who was regarded as Hitler’s greatest general.

From which we conclude that 1978 was a long time ago.