'There is much food for thought in McGinn's discussions and each chapter is rich with a series of considerations for thinking that the currently received views on the various topics have some serious difficulties that need confronting... For those interested in metaphysics and the philosophy of logic, this book will stimulate much further thought' -Mind 'The sweep of the book is broad and the pace is brisk... There is much material here to provide the basis for many a deep (...) philosophical discussion' -Mind 'Lucid and provocative little book... clear, direct and well argued' -Times Higher Education SupplementIdentity, existence, predication, necessity, and truth are fundamental philosophical concerns. Colin McGinn treats them both philosophically and logically, aiming for maximum clarity and minimum pointless formalism. He contends that there are real logical properties that challenge naturalistic metaphysical outlooks. These concepts are not definable, though we can say a good deal about how they work. The aim of Logical Properties is to bring philosophy back to philosophical logic. (shrink)

Colin McGinn has written on a wide range of philosophical issues and is best known for his argument that the human mind is incapable of understanding itself, and that therefore attempts to understand the nature of consciousness are doomed. He has written a novel and a memoir, and has recently turned his attention to the cinema and Shakespeare. He is professor of philosophy at Miami University.

Knowledge and Reality brings together a selection of Colin McGinn's philosophical essays from the 1970s to the 1990s, whose unifying theme is the relation between the mind and the world. McGinn defends a realist view, but emphasises the epistemological problems that come with it. He has written a new postscript to each essay, placing it in its philosophical context and offering his current reflections on the topic.

McGinn's latest brings together moral philosophy and literary analysis in a way that illuminates both. Setting out to enrich the domain of moral reflection by showing the value of literary texts as sources of moral illumination, McGinn starts by setting out an uncompromisingly realist ethical theory, arguing that morality is an area of objective truth and genuine knowledge. He goes on to address such subjects as the nature of goodness, evil character, and the meaning of monstrosity in the (...) context of an aesthetic theory of virtue, which maintains that goodness of character is the same thing as beauty of soul. Looking at such literary works as Billy Budd, Lolita, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Frankenstein, as well as examples from film and painting, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction is an original and compelling book by a leading philosopher who is also a critic and novelist. (shrink)

This book argues that we are not equipped to understand the workings of conciousness, despite its objective naturalness.

Aimed at philsophy graduates this book investigates mental content in a systematic way and advances a number of claims about how mental content states are related to the body and the world. Internalism is the thesis that they are; externalism is the theory that they are not.

The Meaning of Disgust is an original study of a fascinating but neglected subject, which attempts to tell the disturbing truth about the human condition.

The guiding thread of this book is the distinction Colin McGinn draws between perception and imagination.

In this response to the work of Michael Dummett, McGinn aims to vindicate the plausibility of a realist outlook. Realism claims that a sentence's truth is ‘epistemically unconstrained’ or ‘knowledge‐transcendent’, in the sense that the world is as it is independently of our knowing truths about it. Contra Dummett's arguments against the tenability of this realist conviction, McGinn's counter‐argument proceeds by showing, first, ‘that it is an empiricist dogma to suppose that we cannot acquire conceptions that transcend our (...) experience,’ and second, ‘that we can connect experience‐transcendent conceptions with linguistic use by making the observation that such conceptions are fit subjects for communicative speech acts’. (shrink)

Whether it's conkers in the schoolyard, kicking a football in the park, or playing tennis on Wimbledon Centre Court, sport impacts all of our lives. But what is sport and why do we do it? Colin McGinn, renowned philosopher , reflects on our love of sport and explores the value it has for us and the part it plays in a life lived well. Written in the form of a memoir, McGinn discusses many of the sports he (...) has engaged in - from pole-vaulting and gymnastics to windsurfing and tennis - and describes the athletic experience from the inside, as a participant, articulating what is uniquely valuable about sport as an activity. Sport, argues McGinn, takes us to our fullest potential as human beings, it's what we fling at mortality to keep it at bay, a holiday from the Unbearable Heaviness of Being. "Sport" expresses our nature, it bears upon our self-realization. If a happy life consists in one that expresses fully our natural faculties, then sports must play an essential role in our lifes. Mind-body unity, the nature of practical knowledge and physical skill, success and failure, the ethics of competition, peak experiences, the spectacle of professional sport, aesthetics and death, McGinn discusses these and many other issues while telling of his own sporting mishaps and adventures. To use the vernacular of philosophy, "Sport" captures the phenomenology of sport - what it's like to do it - and in doing so shows how sport is a way of expressing and understanding who and what we are, way beyond whether we are a good sportsman, a bad loser or a team-player. For anyone who has ever thought that there must be less humiliating ways to enjoy yourself than being thrashed on the tennis court, "Sport" will reassure you that it's time not wasted. (shrink)

One of our most original thinkers addresses the scientific world's premier question: What is the nature of consciousness?

In this study of the nature of philosophy, Colin McGinn shows us how philosophy can maintain its connection to the past while looking forward to a bright future.

This book investigates the subjective and objective representations of the world, developing analogies between secondary qualities and indexical thoughts and arguing that subjective representations are ineliminable. Throughout, McGinn brings together historical and contemporary discussions to illuminate old problems in a novel way.

This chapter is an extensive critique of the thesis of moral psychologism. Appealing to the Naturalistic Fallacy, McGinn argues that moral psychologism, as instanced in emotivism, the dispositional theory of goodness and relativism, confuses what ought to be the case with what is the case, psychologically. After a discussion of moral intentionality, McGinn concludes that goodness and other moral values are not mental properties but conceptually primitive, evaluative properties that have no place in an empirical science like psychology.

In this previously unpublished follow‐up to ‘Another Look at Colour’, McGinn evaluates a possible objection to the account developed there. In McGinn's view, ‘colours are simple monadic primitive properties whose instantiation supervenes on complex relational dispositions to appear to perceivers in such‐and‐such ways’. According to the objection, the phenomenology of colour experience is wholly uninformative with respect to the ontological nature of colour ; thus, for instance, the question of whether colours are identical to, or rather supervene on, (...) dispositions need not arise. McGinn argues against the neutrality thesis, ultimately defending a kind of externalism about perceptual content, according to which ‘visual experience is a relation between a conscious subject and a cluster of properties, which may or may not be instantiated’. McGinn concludes by criticizing McDowell's neo‐Kantian view of perceptual appearance. (shrink)

This review of Julian Barbour's The End of Time (1999) discusses his Machian theories of dynamics, and his proposal that a Machian perspective enables one to solve the problem of time in quantum geometrodynamics, viz. by saying that there is no time!1 Introduction2 Machian themes in classical physics2.1 The status quo2.2 Machianism2.2.1 The temporal metric as emergent2.2.2 Machian theories2.2.3 Assessing intrinsic dynamics3 The end of time?3.1 Time unreal? The classical case3.1.1 Spontaneity3.1.2 Barbour's vision: time capsules3.2 Evidence from quantum physics?3.2.1 Mott (...) scattering as a model for time capsules3.2.2 Solving the problem of time? (shrink)

The book is short and yet it richly embodies the methods of ethical thinking about practical moral problems that are hard for students to learn unless they see ...

My thesis is: Consciousness is a being such that in its being the being of other being is known. To be conscious is to be in a state of knowingness. The essence of consciousness is knowledge.

Colin McGinn presents his latest work on consciousness in ten interlinked papers, four of them previously unpublished. He extends and deepens his controversial solution to the mind-body problem, defending the view that consciousness is both ontologically unproblematic and epistemologically impenetrable. He also investigates the basis of our knowledge that there is a mind-body problem, and the bearing of this on attempted solutions. McGinn goes on to discuss the status of first-person authority, the possibility of atomism with respect (...) to consciousness, extreme dualism, and the role of non-existent objects in constituting intentionality. He argues that traditional claims about our knowledge of our own mind and of the external world can be inverted; that atomism about the conscious mind might turn out to be true; that dualism is more credible the more extreme it is; and that all intentionality involves non-existent objects. These are all surprising positions, but he contends that what the philosophy of mind needs now is 'methodological radicalism' - a willingness to consider new and seemingly extravagant ideas. (shrink)

With its broad scope and deep study of the fundamental questions at the heart of philosophy of physics, this book is not intended primarily for specialists, but ...

An argument that nativism is true and important but mysterious, examining the particular case of ideas of sensible qualities. In this book, Colin McGinn presents a concise, clear, and compelling argument that the origins of knowledge are innate—that nativism, not empiricism, is correct in its theory of how concepts are acquired. McGinn considers the particular case of sensible qualities—ideas of color, shape, taste, and so on. He argues that these, which he once regarded as the strongest case (...) for the empiricist position, are in fact not well explained by the empiricist account that they derive from interactions with external objects. Rather, he contends, ideas of sensible qualities offer the strongest case for the nativist position—that a large range of our knowledge is inborn, not acquired through the senses. Yet, McGinn cautions, how this can be is deeply problematic; we have no good theories about how innate knowledge is possible. Innate knowledge is a mystery, though a fact. McGinn describes the traditional debate between empiricism and nativism; offers an array of arguments against empiricism; constructs an argument in favor of nativism; and considers the philosophical consequences of adopting the nativist position, discussing perception, the mind–body problem, the unconscious, metaphysics, and epistemology. (shrink)

This advanced introductory text offers a synoptic view of philosophical inquiry, discussing such topics as consciousness, the self, meaning, free will, the a ..