Philosophy

The Making of a Philosopher
My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy
by Colin McGinn
HarperCollins, 256 pp., $25.95

COLIN MCGINN is a clever man--the very clever product of that very clever school of British academic thought known as analytic philosophy. His initial impetus for studying philosophy came, he says, from reading Bertrand Russell, and he studied with the formidable A.J. Ayer, the famed practitioner of the analytic style in its most pristine and most ambitious form, whose goal was to turn philosophy itself into science.

Wittgenstein's Poker
The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers
by David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Ecco, 352 pp., $24

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN and Karl Popper met only once--just after World War II, when Popper addressed the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club. Popper challenged Wittgenstein head on: Philosophy, he said, addresses genuine problems and not, as Wittgenstein would have it, "puzzles" that disappear when proper mental hygiene clears up our conceptual muddles.

IN RESPONSE TO SEPTEMBER 11, people from many walks of life performed their jobs with spirit and guts and aplomb. Exhibiting a high degree of seriousness and professionalism, the police and the firefighters, the doctors and nurses, the ground zero construction crews and the media, the mayor and the president, and the military and their man Rummy in the Pentagon have risen to the occasion. Alas, if Peter Singer's latest offering is in any way representative, the same cannot be said of academic moral philosophers.

Singer, the reader may recall, is the Ira W.

Warranted Christian Belief
by Alvin Plantinga
Oxford Universiy Press, 576 pp., $24.95

Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology
by Nicholas Wolterstorff
Cambridge University Press, 627 pp., $54.95

WHAT ACCOUNTS for the surprising upturn of interest in philosophy of religion in major American departments of philosophy over the last thirty years? Alvin Plantinga's "Warranted Christian Belief" and Nicholas Wolterstorff's "Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology" are illustrative of contemporary philosophy of religion at its best.

"A SINGULAR FACT OF MODERN WAR," the historian Bruce Catton once wrote, "is that it takes charge. Once begun it has to be carried to its conclusion, and carrying it there sets in motion events that may be beyond men's control. Doing what has to be done to win, men perform acts that alter the very soil in which society's roots are nourished." Catton was writing about the Civil War, but his observation applies to most wars, and it will likely apply to the war to which we are now committed.

FINDING A NEW BOOK by the political philosopher Leo Strauss more than a generation after his death in 1973 is as startling and unexpected as discovering a lost manuscript by Bach in some dark and remote German basement. Strauss has become famous among American conservatives as an opponent of relativism or historicism and as a friend of natural right or law. His rediscovery of natural standards led to a fresh and salutary look by some of his students at how equal natural rights, not arbitrary power or chance, form the bedrock of the United States.

IT’S BEEN THIRTY-FOUR YEARS, and you haven’t changed at all—flattering if exclaimed immediately by a friend one hasn’t seen in all that time, less so if blurted out after fifteen minutes of conversation. It’s true in both senses of Stanley Fish, whose latest book, How Milton Works, contains pages of still-youthful exuberance that match the verve, insight, and persuasive force of Surprised by Sin, his indispensable 1967 book on Paradise Lost.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS will soon come under increasingly severe attacks from Internet pirates. These digital assaults should concern all those who believe that secure property rights provide the foundation for a prosperous society. Unfortunately, the best methods for protecting intellectual property should be anathema to conservatives.

The Internet already makes it easy for the well-wired to copy music illicitly. The likely growth of broadband Internet access will soon make it possible for many to pilfer movies as well.

FOR QUITE SOME TIME NOW, METAPHYSICS -- traditionally central philosophical discipline -- has been looked at askance by philosophers themselves. For Marxists, metaphysics seemed merely religion making a masked reappearance. For Heideggerians and deconstructionists, it was a dubious "onto-theology." For positivists, it was an outdated and pointless intellectual exercise. And for adherents of Anglo-American analytic philosophy (most notably A.J.