Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn (born 10 March 1950) is a British philosopher. He has held teaching posts and professorships at University College London, the University of Oxford, Rutgers University, and the University of Miami.^[1]

McGinn is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind, and in particular for what is known as new mysterianism, the idea that the human mind is not equipped to solve the problem of consciousness. He is the author of over 20 books on this and other areas of philosophy, including The Character of Mind (1982), The Problem of Consciousness (1991), Consciousness and Its Objects (2004), and The Meaning of Disgust (2011).^[1]

Early life and education

McGinn was born in West Hartlepool, a mining town in County Durham, England. Several of his relatives, including both grandfathers, were miners. His father, Joseph, also left school to become a miner, but put himself through night school and became a building manager instead. McGinn was the eldest of three children, all sons. When he was three, the family moved to Gillingham, Kent, and eight years later to Blackpool, Lancashire. Having failed his 11-plus, he attended a technical school in Kent, then a secondary modern in Blackpool, but did well enough in his O-levels to be transferred to the local grammar school for his A-levels.^[2]

In 1968 he began a degree in psychology at the University of Manchester, obtaining a first-class honours degree in 1971 and an MA in 1972, also in psychology.^[1] He was admitted in 1972 to Jesus College, Oxford, at first to study for a Bachelor of Letters postgraduate degree, but he switched to the Bachelor of Philosophy (BPhil) postgraduate programme on the recommendation of his advisor, Michael R. Ayers. In 1973 he was awarded the university's prestigious John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy; one of the examiners was A.J. Ayer (1910–1989).^[3] He received his BPhil in 1974, writing a thesis under the supervision of Michael Ayers and P. F. Strawson (1919–2006) on the semantics of Donald Davidson (1917–2003).^[4]

Teaching posts

McGinn taught at University College London for 11 years, first as a lecturer in philosophy (1974–1984), then as reader (1984–1985). He succeeded Gareth Evans (1946–1980) as Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at the University of Oxford in 1985, a position he held until 1990. He held visiting professorships at the University of California, Los Angeles (1979), University of Bielefeld (1982), University of Southern California (1983), Rutgers University (1984), University of Helsinki (1986), City University of New York (1988) and Princeton University (1992). In 1990 he joined the philosophy department at Rutgers as a full professor, working alongside Jerry Fodor.^[1]

He stayed at Rutgers until 2005, joining the University of Miami in 2006 as Professor of Philosophy and Cooper Fellow.^[1] In January 2013 he resigned his position at Miami, effective at the end of the calendar year, following allegations that he had sent inappropriate emails to a female graduate student. He denied any wrongdoing.^[5] The incident triggered a debate about the position of women within philosophy.^[6]

Writing and broadcasting

Philosophy of mind

McGinn has written extensively about philosophical logic, metaphysics and the philosophy of language, but is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind. He is known in particular for the development of the idea that human minds are incapable of solving the problem of consciousness, a position known as new mysterianism. In addition to his academic publications on consciousness – including The Character of Mind (1982), The Problem of Consciousness (1991) and Consciousness and Its Objects (2004) – he has written a popular introduction, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (1999).^[7]

Owen Flanagan introduced the term "new mysterians" in 1991 (named after Question Mark & the Mysterians, a 1960s band) to describe McGinn's position and that of Thomas Nagel, first described in Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" (1974).^[8] McGinn introduced his position in "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?" (Mind, 1989), arguing that the problem of consciousness has arisen because the human mind is incapable of comprehending itself entirely.^[9] Mark Rowlands writes that the article was largely responsible for reviving the debate about phenomenal consciousness, or the nature of experience.^[10] McGinn argued in the paper for the idea of cognitive closure:

A type of mind M is cognitively closed with respect to a property P (or a theory T), if and only if the concept-forming procedures at M's disposal cannot extend to a grasp of P (or an understanding of T). Conceiving minds come in different kinds, equipped with varying powers and limitations, biases and blindspots, so that properties (or theories) may be accessible to some minds but not to others."^[9]

Although we might grasp the concept of consciousness, McGinn argues that we cannot understand its causal basis: neither direct examination of consciousness nor of the brain can identify the properties that cause or provide the mechanism for consciousness, or how "technicolour phenomenology [can] arise from soggy grey matter."^[11] Thus, his answer to the hard problem of consciousness is that the answer is inaccessible to us.^[12]

New, or epistemological, mysterianism is contrasted with old, or ontological, mysterianism, the idea that consciousness is inherently mysterious or supernatural. The new mysterians are not Cartesian dualists.^[8] McGinn argues only that human minds cannot understand consciousness, not that there is anything supernatural about it. He describes his position as existential naturalism: "the thesis, metaphysical in character, that nothing that happens in nature is inherently anomalous, God-driven, an abrogation of basic laws – whether or not we can come to comprehend the processes at work."^[13]

Novels and articles

Outside his work in philosophy, McGinn is known for his sharp book reviews.^[14] He has regularly contributed reviews and short stories to the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books,^[15] and has written occasionally for Nature, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Times and The Times Literary Supplement. He has also written two novels, The Space Trap (1992) and Bad Patches (2012).^[1]

Radio and television

McGinn has taken part in numerous radio and television interviews. He discussed John Searle's Reith lectures on BBC Radio Three with Searle, Richard Gregory and Colin Blakemore in 1984. In 1985 he debated animal rights with Sir Andrew Huxley, with Bernard Williams as the moderator.^[1] McGinn is a supporter of animal rights, writing in a review of the 1990 edition of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation that "our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil."^[16] He has also discussed his position as an antitheist in several broadcasts, and was interviewed at length for Jonathan Miller's documentary mini-series, Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (2004).^[17] In the interview he explains: "I am an antitheist, because I believe that religion is harmful in human lives."

Works

Books

Selected articles

See also

References

Further reading

External links, interviews

• [Official Website http://www.colinmcginn.net/]
• Colin McGinn, London Review of Books.
• Colin McGinn, The New York Review of Books.
• Colin McGinn, The New York Times.
• "Portraits: Colin McGinn" (interview), Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, PBS, 30 June 2006.
• "To Be Or Not To Be: Colin McGinn Dissects The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays" (interview), simplycharly.com, undated.
• Levine, David. "Colin McGinn" (sketch), The New York Review of Books, 7 April 2005.

Books and articles

• Blakeslee, Sandra. "The Conscious Mind Is Still Baffling to Experts of All Stripes", The New York Times, 16 April 1996.
• Croke, Vicki; McGinn, Colin, et al. "A Consideration of Policy Implications: A Panel Discussion", Social Research, 62(3), "In the Company of Animals" conference, Fall 1995, pp. 801–838.
• Everitt, Nicholas. "Moral Literacy: or How To Do The Right Thing by Colin McGinn", Philosophy Now, Sep/Oct 2012.
• Fearn, Nicholas. "Proudly Ignorant", New Statesman, 9 June 2003 (review of McGinn's The Making of a Philosopher).
• Flanagan, Owen J. Consciousness Reconsidered, The MIT Press, 1992.
• Horgan, John. The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation, Free Press, 1999.
  • For a discussion of the above, see Nature. "Mysterianism lite" (editorial), 3(199), 2000.
• Kriegel, Uriah. "Philosophical Theories of Consciousness: Contemporary Western Perspectives. Mysterianism," in Philip David Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 36–41.
• Kriegel, Uriah. "Mysterianism," in Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Wilken (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 461–462.
• Mason, Wyatt. "Alone in the Dark", The New York Times, 22 January 2006 (review of McGinn's The Power of Movies).
• Rowlands, Mark. The Nature of Consciousness, Cambridge University Press, 2001.