My Novels How should my novels be interpreted? I wrote them, so I should know. There are two: Bad Patches and The Space Trap. The first title suggests both bad patches in a life and bad patches in a person—and their interplay. The second title might suggest a science fiction story, but actually refers to […]
Quasi-Empiricism Let’s go boldly into the dark belly of the whale, where the mysteries are as thick as whale blubber. We will strain to see, but we may come back with some nuggets of gold. No one knows the origin of concepts, or their inner nature, or even their appearance (do they ever actually appear?); […]
Concepts of Mind We have concepts of mind, but where do they come from? According to a hallowed tradition, they come from the mind itself, or rather our perception of it. Just as we get our concepts of external objects from external objects (in both senses of “object”), so we get our concepts of internal […]
Dear professor Colin McGinn, First of all I want to say ‘Thank You‘ for having written such insightfull and brain-teasing (pun intended;-) books and articles on mind, soul, body & their possible interactions! I’ve tried to contradict TN, most recently during a holiday in France this summer, but alas, my arguments thus far didn’t hold […]
Colin: I love the piece. I took the liberty of appending a healthy portion of it to your Landscape entry, lengthening what was already the longest entry. I think it is important to stress your position, particularly your current way of thinking, because your “mysterianism” is a core contribution to the M-B Problem, and it […]
Problems of Consciousness Think back to the time when we had very little knowledge of the brain, but substantial knowledge of consciousness and the mind generally. We didn’t even know that the brain is the organ of the body responsible for the mind, or that any bodily organ is (it might emanate from an astral […]
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Fetal Philosophy What kind of philosophy would an intelligent fetus develop? We ourselves don’t have much active intelligence in the womb, but what if we did? What if instead of nine months we had nine years? What if the brain was fully formed by the second year of life, but we were still unborn? Surely […]
Argentina and Me I decided to buy an Argentina football jersey. Is it because I support the Argentinian team? No, I support no particular team and don’t even watch football regularly. I bought it because I like the design—those light blue vertical stripes. I bought it for aesthetic reasons. It is true that I bought […]
Moral Knowledge and Moral Language Moral knowledge is one thing; moral language is quite another. The two topics need to be treated separately. I am mainly concerned here with the language question, but I will make some prefatory remarks about moral knowledge. Moral knowledge comprises knowledge-that, knowledge-how, and knowledge-what: we know (say) that genocide is […]