Is God an Atheist?   God (if he exists) is a rational being. He believes in his own existence only if it is rational so to believe. So does God believe in his own existence? It might be thought that he has quick route to his existence—the divine version of the Cogito. God […]

    Philosophical Knowledge   I wish to examine the distinctive nature of philosophical knowledge. I don’t want to place much emphasis on the concept of knowledge; if that is too vaunted a term, we can as well speak of opinion or hypothesis or reasoning—whatever it is we do mentally when we do the thing […]

    Analytic and A Priori   Take any ordinary analytic statement and prefix it with “It’s analytic that”: is the result analytic? Is “It’s analytic that bachelors are unmarried males” analytic? The answer would appear to be yes, since the meanings of the embedded sentence and the word “analytic” entail its truth. You don’t […]

Philosophical Philosophy by Colin MCGinn AbstrACt: I here set out my general conception of philosophy: it consists of a set of timeless problems that are not of the same nature as standard scientific problems, though we can rightly describe philosophy as a sci- ence. These problems are peculiarly difficult, which makes progress hard to achieve. […]