A sense of wonderConfessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee. Weider*Id and Nicolson, E25, ISBN 0 279 81959 3

A YOUNG boy sits with 800 of his fellow schoolpupils in morning assembly. He closes his eyesand the rest o f his school disappears. He isgripped by the thought that his only experience ofthe world is what presents itself to him in the con-fines of his head. He feels trapped. Filled with ter-ror, he runs pale-faced out of the building. Such isthe impact of real philosophical problems.

Why is there anything at all? Can time itselfhave a beginning? Is there a domain that is inprinciple beyond what we can know? Are therethings we can know, but cannot say, only show,such as beauty or love? Imagine growing up withthese problems, being frightened, perplexed andfascinated by them, but nevertheless makingthem your own. This was the path that the curi-ous boy, Bryan Magee, is still walking. Confessionsof a Philosopher is an engaging account of philo-sophical problems as Magee encountered them.

Magee has been an MP, a critic o f musicand theatre and is widely known for his TV seriesMen of Ideas. He is a fellow of Queen MaryCollege, London, and fellow of Keble College,Oxford. He reckons people fall into three cate-gories in their response to life's fundamentalquestions: the childlike wonder of the philoso-pher; the flight into faith of the religious; andthe simple refusal to think about them character-istic of most people. The first group realises thatthe questions, although apparently unanswer-able, are significant and that you can at leastexplore them. The second class realises thatthere are no answers but acknowledges the ques-tions are important, and embraces faith as i fignorance were a licence to believe what youwish. The third group simply fails to see the ques-tions' significance, crawling back into the comfortof common sense.

Magee's heroes are those philosophers who didnot lose their childhood wonder, but insteadcultivated it and tried to answer the big questions.His list includes Hume, Kant and Schopenhauer,and, this century, Heidegger, Popper, Russell andWittgenstein. The villains are the philosopherswho have tried to reduce philosophy to thelinguistic analysis of questions without trying toanswer them: Austin, Rvie and Strawson.

Magee had the good fortune to have knowntwo of this century's greatest philosophers, Pop-per and Russell. He says that Popper argued withan intensity reminiscent of a blowtorch, thusbetraying his own argument for liberal tolerance.Popper realised that you cannot check how stronga position is it you do not defend it with vigour.Magee remarks how excited Popper would be

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when he arrived at his home, and how he woulddrag him straight into the white heat of hiscurrent problem.

Magee is enthralled not only by Popper'sapproach to ascertaining the truth of knowledge,but also by Kant's argument for the limitations tohuman knowledge and understanding. Since ourknowledge is limited to what we can possiblyexperience, and our possible experience is limitedby the structure of our brains and sensory appa-ratus, our knowledge is limited by our physiol-ogy. We too are trapped inside our heads.

But Magee does not explore the possibility thatlanguage, an example of Popper's World 3 objects(abstract products of the mind), has liberated usfrom our physiology. The content of Einstein'sgeneral theory of relativity, a denizen of World 3,is clearly not limited by our physiology. And theInternet and artificial intelligence is set to extendthe domain of World 3 beyond our feeble frames.We'll feel less claustrophobia than that small boyin assembly.

Ray Percival is president of Kart Popper Forums athttP!//www.eeng•dcu.ie/—tkow

New Scient is t

Volcanoes of doom?*Sue Bowler onFisher, Heiken and

Huten •Ray Percivalon Bryan MageeJohn Casti onWang's Gedel