Philosopher A Kind Of LifeThe 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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... properties , each of these also being an effect . The sequence starts further back than any first thought or feeling about the action , let alone the choosing or willing of it . Indeed the sequence goes back to events that are not ...
... properties involve what it is easier to name than analyse , a fundamental subjectivity . That is their essential nature . They are not anything less . This conviction about subjectivity , much more so than determinism , has a fortifying ...
... properties of the brain . Or rather , that our human minds have only the properties of our brains , which is to say electrochemical properties . Putting aside computers and other unlikely possessors of consciousness , consciousness is ...
... properties isn't made better by the addition that it had causes and effects , and these were of the essence . There was a lot more essence to the feeling , which was its fundamental subjectivity . That is something easy to say , but a ...
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Contents
1 | |
33 | |
City school Saturdays girls | 49 |
From university distracted First Love | 62 |
Awake in England | 90 |
Bracing life assigned to punishment married again | 112 |
A department joined moral and political utterances | 131 |
Nadir determinism again America | 150 |
Mind and brain etc anathema | 244 |
Professor psychoneural intimacy disarrays | 261 |
Mental and other events Johnny determinism done | 277 |
Lifehopes the Grote an idead girl | 301 |
Harmless drudge functionalism socialist landlord | 327 |
Ingrid court again | 353 |
Consciousness as existence farewells | 368 |
Coda | 386 |
Academic battles political violence an ending | 176 |
Effects a proud Scot justice 4 Keats Grove | 199 |
The higher social life Chancery Court much else | 221 |
Index | 427 |