FYI Subject: Looking Forward to Our Upcoming Interview Project Dear Professor McGinn, I hope this message finds you well. I just wanted to say a brief hello and to let you know how excited I am to be continuing preparations for our long-form interview. I’ve been deeply immersed in your writings—revisiting many of your books […]
Trauma For “trauma” the OED gives us “a deeply distressing experience; emotional shock following a stressful event”. The word comes from the Greek for “wound”; in medicine it means “physical injury”. These words are all on the button. Not just distressing but deeply distressing; a certain type of experience not just an external event (there […]
Dream Laser Steven Pinker once said of me, “McGinn is an ingenious philosopher who thinks like a laser and writes like a dream”. Nicely put, Steve, memorable, poetic. But what exactly does it mean? Is it true? We should certainly take it seriously because (a) Pinker is one the world’s top cognitive psychologists, (b) he […]
Ontological Rationalism Ontological rationalism is the view that the world is intrinsically intelligible.[1] Roughly, the world is intelligible if and only if it obeys laws with some kind of necessity; it is unintelligible if it is completely random, contingent, chaotic. An unintelligible world is one in which anything can happen at any time, e.g., night […]
Resignation People sometimes assume that my resignation twelve years ago was an admission of guilt. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is very naïve to think otherwise. The decision was carefully considered and took in many factors, some unrelated to the situation at hand. Chief among them was the aggravation and cost entailed […]
Kinds of Kind Kinds are of many kinds. Sortals are of many sorts. We should not assimilate one to another. Some kinds are obscurely defined. My question concerns mental kinds—what kind of kind are they? First, consider chemical and physical kinds, such as heat, water, and light. The modern theory of these is well known: […]
Intellectual Romance What is an intellectual romance? A romance of the intellect, of course; it isn’t a romance between intellectuals, as in a love affair between intellectual people. Here is a standard definition: “The connection between two people in a relationship where they share ideals, thoughts, and opinions, finding stimulation and enjoyment in each other’s […]
Colin Through the Looking Glass Now I know why I am not allowed on campus: I might enter into a (non-romantic) romantic relationship with a student and fail to report it because it would be bad for the student. It’s perfectly clear: it’s wrong to not report (non-romantic) romantic relationships even if to make such […]
De Re Consciousness of the Brain Do I have de re consciousness of my brain when I have de dicto consciousness of my mind? I speak of de reconsciousness not of de re belief or perception: the locution “conscious of” admits of a de re-de dicto ambiguity—does it mean a relation or a content? Suppose […]
Perception De Dicto and De Re Locke held that all we ever perceive of external objects is their powers and not their intrinsic qualities: we do perceive their powers to produce sensations in us, and we don’t perceive the basis of these powers in the object. This seems doubly wrong: we don’t perceive powers and […]