This year I told meself I'd blog on 12 great books. One book a month. One Book of each Month - a B.O.M.

A great book is one which excites one to learn, to explore, to find out more about topics, issues or persons previously declared boring and/or not-worth-my-time. Every re-reading (and there will be many) is done with pleasure and usually even more profit than the first. This won't be no book you'd trade away for a few bucks. This has to be a piece of work which blows you away, which makes you appreciate the fact that you can read, which compels you to say now why the hell didn't I buy this earlier?!

The names Kant, Popper, Russell and Schopenhauer don't exactly rock my world. I have, in fact, mentally decided unless I register for a B.Phil, no way I'm gonna read any of their original works. So when, not halfway into Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher– my B.O.M. selection for February - I find myself thirsting for books like The Open Society & Its Enemies (Popper's masterpiece) and The Critique of Pure Reason (Kant's), I know I've been hooked. A former MP, a music-lover (who's also an expert on Wagner, it seems), a producer of television programs, novelist and academician, Magee brings his own story into that of Western philosophy. Real-life, real-world, real-emotion ingredients. Philosophy spiced up.

Magee provides an accessible tour through some of the biggest names in philosophy, all the way from Plato to Popper (too bad there wasn't any mention of the post-modernists, but with the book almost 600 pages long one isn't complaining much). The auto-biographical elements serve as introductory launch-pads common problems in the discipline e.g. how one knows, what can be known, the nature of time and space, the problem of volition, how the mind (if it's even meaningful to speak of it) can effect the body, what meaning in life there is (Magee confesses contemplating suicide upon reflecting on the vast nothingness and senselessness of human existence), religion, plus some tips on how to write novels, how to produce television programs, select interview candidates, structure philosophical questions for key philosophers and so on.

Many aspects of Magee's views on philosophy as a discipline resonate with mine on theology (a subject which Magee unfortunately rejects as something only for the unthinking). He insists that true philosophical substance cannot be reduced to linguistic analysis, a nasty habit which I think has afflicted theologians as well, especially those who're often tempted to emphasize propositions about God over against the experience and reality of God Himself (as if they amounted to the same thing).

"Anyone who truly believes that the real task of philosophy is to clarify utterance must believe that non-linguistic reality presents us with no philosophical problems." (p. 113)

Ditto, theology. If theological thinking is confined to only that which we can speak about or capture in creeds, then it's no wonder much of modern theology is so anaemic and irrelevant to real life.

"What one gets from philosophy consists largely not of true propositions but a way of looking at things, a way of seeing things. An approach that merely grubs along at the level of merely analysing the logic of arguments or the use of concepts lives a hidebound, blinkered existence at the lowest possible level of existence the subject has to offer." (p.513)

I was forced to rethink my previous fascination with the likes of Ryle and Wittgenstein, analytical linguists and logical connoisseurs par excellence but - philosophers? After reading Magee, one wonders if they were in fact philosophizing or merely thinking about how to talk (with all due respect to their "life-enhancing intellectual brilliance", as how Magee described Ryle, whom he actually knew personally and whose peers use to joke about not having a personal life worth talking about).

His extended glimpses into the personal lives of both Russell and Popper refreshingly took the discussion of these philosophers beyond the realm of abstract ideas. How often are we taught a man's work minus the passion and fire of his life? All of which complements Magee's emphasis of the absolute need to read authors in their original. When you know a certain person, then your experience of his philosophy is enriched. Secondary sources just don't cut it. It's more than just the idea, more than summarising, say, Kant within a few pages.

"There seems to be something fundamentally interactive about the nature of philosophy – not only interactive between an individual and a problem but but interactive between one individual and another. Questioning, dialogue, discussion, debate, argument – these seem to be, in some central way, essential to the nature of philosophy. So it is only when we are interacting with a philosopher and his work that we really 'getting' him.

Only if we read a philosopher for ourselves can we really know how we react to him, what we think of him, and what, if anything we consider important about what he is saying." (p. 307)

I admit this reawakened in me a desire to experience all the power, tension and flavour an original work has to offer. And I felt more than a tinge of regret that for many years my key objective in philosophy and even theology was to distil the "main ideas" from a writer and put it alongside all the rest, like pins on a wall.

For avid students of Kant, Popper and Schopenhauer, you will likely not get a better introduction to not just their work, but also the background and surrounding intellectual fervour. For general philosophical enthusiasts, you get a lively tour of philosophical problems and history, in addition to very practical insights like, "…if our argument reaches a stage at which we begin to repeat ourselves, then at that point we must usually agree to differ."

(And we're only in February…*smile*)