The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-century Philosophy

To many people, the activity called 'philosophy' sounds abstract, rarefied, worthy. But it was never that to Colin McGinn, growing up in Gillingham and Blackpool: it was just part of trying to work out what was going on. Now a distinguished professor of philosophy and the author of a number of scholarly works, McGinn has written a genuinely popular introduction to philosophy.
The result is part memoir, part explanation of philosophy 'as part of a flesh and blood human life' - the self-portrait of an inquiring mind, engaged by the radicalism of both rock 'n' roll and Bertrand Russell, which took McGinn from a mining family in West Hartlepool to Rutgers Professor of Philosophy in New York. It contains wonderful sketches of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and their ideas - Sartre, Wittgenstein, Chomsky - and the teachers who formed his own ideas and often became friends, like the colourful Oxford don A.J. Ayer.
Equally at home discussing The Matrix and metaphysics, THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER shows us the mind of a brilliant thinker in action, putting the activity of asking questions naturally at the centre of human activity.