Entries by Colin McGinn

Consciousness and Sleep

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                                                  Consciousness and Sleep     Why do we say that a person is unconscious when asleep but conscious when awake? During sleep we often dream and dreaming is a conscious activity of mind, so why don’t we say that we are often conscious while sleep? Why do we speak as if sleeping […]

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Evolution of Language

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                                                  Evolution of Language     Consider a hypothetical species with the following profile: they have evolved by mutation and natural selection a language of thought, an internal symbolic system of infinite scope and finite base. This they use as the medium of their thought. They have not yet, however, evolved a public language […]

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Semantic Levels

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                                                    Semantic Levels     Anyone interested in language and perception will recognize that there are different levels of analysis of the phenomenon in question. In linguistics we will distinguish […]

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Philosophy and Form

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    Philosophy and Form     Philosophy is versatile as to form. We have the long-form book or monograph, the medium length article, the note or comment, and the epigram. There is also the dialogue form (Plato, Hume, Berkeley). Philosophy can be written as poetry (Lucretius, Eliot, Donne) or performed in a play (Shaw, […]

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Knowledge By Necessity

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                                                      Knowledge By Necessity     We can know that a proposition is true and we can know that a proposition is necessary, but can we know that a proposition is true by knowing that it is necessary? Consider a simple tautology like “Hesperus = Hesperus”: don’t you know this is true […]

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The Utra-Selfish Gene

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                                                      The Ultra-Selfish Gene     In David Attenborough’s nature documentary Frozen Planet there is some remarkable and rare footage of polar bears mating. The male begins a twenty-mile trek through deep snow lured by the scent of a distant female. He catches up with her and engages in courting behavior, which […]

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Philosophical Originality

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    Philosophical Originality     What produces philosophical originality? One answer is genius: from time to time a genius crops up and from his or her fertile brain originality flows. Then we have a golden age. No doubt the greatest philosophers were geniuses, so it is natural to suppose that this is what brings […]

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Combining Concepts

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                                                    Combining Concepts     We possess concepts and we combine them into thoughts. Those are deceptively easy words to say. What is this “possessing” of concepts? Somehow concepts are stored in the mind, unconsciously, but not in the form of use or mention: we are not using all of our concepts at […]

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