the philosophy of schopenhauer by bryan magee

To read the works in the original, Magee learned German, which gave him a niche in Britain, where few philosophers had studied the language.įor a period he taught philosophy at Balliol College but found linguistic philosophy, then in vogue at Oxford, too much like logic-chopping. There he met and was influenced by the philosopher Susanne K Langer, who introduced him to Kant and Schopenhauer. Back at Oxford he began and abandoned a doctorate in philosophy and then spent a year on a study trip to Yale in the US. After his divorce he had several relationships but never remarried. He then took up a teaching post in Sweden, where he made a short marriage to Ingrid Söderlund, with whom he had a daughter, Gunnela. He and his peers, including William Rees-Mogg, Jeremy Thorpe and Michael Heseltine, expected to become masters of the universe. While at Oxford he published a volume of verse, Crucifixion and Other Poems (1951), and became president of the Oxford Union in 1953. After school he did national service with the Intelligence Corps and then went to Keble College, Oxford, where he read history, graduated with a second, and gained another with a one-year course in philosophy, politics and economics.

This ancient public school transformed his life. From Frederick, Bryan also absorbed a love of Wagner and leftwing political views.Įncouraged by his father, the bright cockney boy won a London county council scholarship to Christ’s Hospital in Sussex. Bryan acquired a passion for theatre and classical music from him his mother, Sheila (nee Lynch), veered between indifference and opposition to her son’s interests. He had a close relationship with his father, Frederick, a man of little education but with a love of culture, who ran a clothing shop. When he returned, much of Hoxton had been flattened by German bombs. During the second world war he was evacuated to rural Market Harborough in Leicestershire. Magee was shaped by his childhood in east London in the 1930s. But he was also stimulating company, delighting in gossip, others’ as well as his own. A complicated man, he was almost solipsistic in his determination to concentrate on what interested him at the time, a trait that could strike friends as insensitive. He published a third volume, Making the Most of It, in 2018. In his 70s, he wrote two acclaimed memoirs of his childhood in Hoxton, east London Clouds of Glory (2004) won the JR Ackerley prize for autobiography and was followed by Growing Up in a War (2007).

His interest in ideas seemed in part a journey of self-discovery. Bryan Magee was sustained by visiting appointments at various Oxbridge colleges, and universities including Harvard, Yale, London and Sydney.

The philosophy of schopenhauer by bryan magee