I finished reading Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee. I have several comments on the last chapter. One is that replacing the phrase "X is a certain truth" with "X is an almost certain truth" does not make one a serious fallibilist. There have been hints that Magee doesn't really understand fallibilism throughout the book, and it's pretty blatant in the final chapter. On the last page of the book Magee talks about what we can and can't prove as if that's important. A fallibilist would know that we can't prove anything, so "can we prove X?" is not a useful thing to wonder about X.

Here is an example of Magee's disrespect for fallibilism on page 454:

We may not know how to answer [the questions above], but their significance--and, what is more, their fundamental importance--can scarcely be open to doubt.

And another on page 452:

I think I know that our situation is at least roughly as I have described it up to this point.

BTW, what is he so sure of? That realism is false! He's so sure that we have "selves" that are not part of the natural world. He's so sure that looking into a person's eyes is not a physical process. He's so sure that his favorite school of philosophy (German Idealism) is correct. How sad and parochial!

I think the worst passage in the book is this one, on the second to last page (462):

Throughout my life I have believed that I knew when I was doing wrong. The problem in those cases has not been knowing what was right but doing it.

Throughout the book Magee makes one thing especially clear: he loves philosophy. He is curious. He has questions and he wants answers. He loves to learn new things. He cares about creating knowledge.

This passage is a striking exception. It is extremely disrespectful to philosophy. It says that with regard to morality, philosophy has nothing to offer us. It says there are no interesting or important problems or questions to explore about how to live. It says that thinking is not needed. All that is needed is to obey the moral rules his parents taught him, and they are good enough for all of time, and the only problem is how to obey them more faithfully.

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee page 451:

According to the laws of physics nothing comes out of anyone's eyes at all. Light rays go into the eye, and cause all sorts of things to happen inside a person, such as seeing and headaches, but there is nothing at all that comes out of the eye into the surrounding space. According to all the scientific knowledge we have, what I see when I look into someone's eyes is the light from the surrounding air reflected back to me from the surfaces of the person's eyeballs, and that light is outside the person, the light in the air around us coming back at me again. If it is dark I cannot see the person: it is only by the surrounding light that I see the surfaces of his eyeballs, with whatever degree of clarity that allows. And that, according to science, is the whole of the situation. But who actually believes it? Who can believe it? The truth of which most of us have indubitable experience every day is that when I look into another person's eyes I am in what is for the most part a reliable degree of contact with multitudinous things going on inside that person--and he with multitudinous things going on inside me: feelings, moods, thoughts, intentions, hesitations, doubts, fears, hopes, and a host of other highly variegated inner states, together with attempts to conceal or dissemble any or all of those, most of it fleeting and flashing past in flickering instants of time, and the whole of it nuanced and inflected in subtle and sophisticated ways. Is there anyone who believes that this staunchless two-way flow of information is physically encoded on the surfaces of our eyeballs in a way that changes multitudinously instant by instant like a flow of orchestral sound (if so, how is it encoded?) and read off in the surrounding light by observers who instantly and accurately decode it in what is at both ends an essentially computing process? I have yet to hear of such a person.

I am such a person.

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee page 441:

most people tend either to believe that all reality is in principle knowable or to believe that there is a religious dimension to things. A third alternative--that we can know very little but have equally little ground for religious belief--receives scant consideration, and yet seems to me to be where the truth lies. Simple though it is, people have difficulty getting their minds round it.

This standard plot is found in over 9000 movies:

omfg hi
omfg hi
omfg i lik u
omfg i'm coy
omfg i lik u 2
omfg we happy
omfg i did bad
omfg i hat u
omfg i sry
omfg fuk u
omfg i sry
omfg i sry
omfg i sry
omfg wtf fein
omfg i'm forgiven?
omfg i guess
omfg we're <3
omfg happy ever after

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee page 414

[Bertrand Russell] believed that mathematics was a body of knowledge about reality until the young Wittgenstein convinced him that mathematical truths were tautologies.

Here are two unfortunate quotes by Popper:

http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3476946.html

if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.

Myth of the Framework page 125:

Avoidance of war is ... the overriding problem of public policy ... In this context it should be stated very clearly that one of the most disturbing aspects of recent events is the cult of violence. We all know that one of the most horrible aspects of our entertainment industry is the constant propaganda for violence, from allegedly harmless Westerns and crime stories to displays of cruelty pure and simple. It is tragic to see that this propaganda has had its effects even on genuine artists and scientists, and unfortunately also on our students (as the cult of revolutionary violence shows).

To solve a problem, or to accomplish anything at all, there are only three fundamental obstacles.

1) It may be impossible.

2) You may lack knowledge of how to do it.

3) You may not want to do it.

The first is about the laws of physics, the second the laws of epistemology, and the third the laws of morality. Because people are universal knowledge creators -- they can create any knowledge that can be created -- (2) can only be a temporary obstacle.

(1) can prevent us doing things, but it need not ever make us unhappy. Human problems are soluble within the laws of physics. Suppose we had the ideal world that was physically possible -- utopia. It would be ridiculous to be unhappy about that (especially given that in our present, imperfect society there is already a lot of good). So we can reach a point within the laws of physics which we can be happy with.

(3) can also prevent us doing things, but it can never make us unhappy. If we'd be happy about doing something then it allows it.

(2), despite being the temporary obstacle, is more problematic. We can create knowledge without limit, but there are no guarantees about when we'll learn a given thing. We might have a problem and not learn the knowledge that would solve it for hundreds of years. So to be happy (now) we need a life strategy that can cope with not having lots of knowledge. We can expect to have some knowledge, and some ignorance, and we can't guarantee having any specific piece of knowledge (or acquiring it in under a trillion years).

Fortunately we can get by with an arbitrarily large amount of ignorance. If we get stuck on a particular problem that we can't figure out then we can always replace it with a new one. And if we get stuck again then we can replace it again. We can do this without limit until we find a problem we know how to solve, now.

I may post the method later.

It's interesting to analyze people not by how left-wing or right-wing they are, but instead by which direction their mistakes tend to be in. Which direction on the political spectrum should they have moved to make less mistakes?

I have found many of examples of mistakes in a leftward direction. Karl Popper was sympathetic to socialism and disliked the influence of TV. Friedrich Hayek supported a guaranteed minimum income. David Friedman incorrectly conceded points about public goods to anti-capitalists. Bryan Magee, Richard Dawkins, and William Godwin provide further examples. All of these people would be well served by more right-wing attitudes.

It's hard to find good thinkers who could be improved by being more left wing. The best example I've found so far is Ann Coulter.

In other words, here are some mistakes common to the left wing: environmentalism, anti-capitalism and socialism, authoritarianism, anti-Americanism, anti-semitism, cultural relativism, moral relativism, being a revolutionary. And here are some mistakes common to the right wing: homophobia, anti-semitism, being pro-life, creationism, being overly attached to religion over reason, sexism. The items on the first list of mistakes are considerably more common among good thinkers than the items on the second list.

What this means isn't obvious.