How to do Philosophy We are confronted by a world we don’t fully understand. We try by various methods to gain understanding of it, sometimes successfully. Philosophy is one such effort. Suppose we want to understand X: we talk about X, have thoughts about X, but we don’t know the nature of X, or the […]
Naming, Necessity, and Mind I propose to offer an interpretation of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity that has not (I believe) been offered before. I do not say that this interpretation consciously occurred to the author of that work—in fact, I think it didn’t. But I do claim that it illuminates what is going on argumentatively […]
Apropos the Knowledge Argument The knowledge argument tells us that complete physical knowledge of the world is not complete knowledge of the world—in particular, it is not complete knowledge of the mind. How interesting is this conclusion? It depends what we mean by “physical”. Suppose we mean “included in Newtonian physics”, with its talk of […]
The Age of Mystery Intellectual historians like to divide up the history of human thought into distinct periods and give them descriptive names: Antiquity, the Middle (Dark) Ages, the Early Modern Period, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, the Romantic Period, the Age of Analysis (I invented that one). But what […]
Life Saving It’s not every day that you save someone’s life. Some years ago, I was visited by the philosopher Amie Thomasson at my home on Miami Beach. We were doing water sports. She got into my waveski (a kayak for surfing). I instructed her not to put on the seatbelt until I had explained […]
Phenomenology of Death What is the phenomenology of death? What is it like to die? What does the final cessation of consciousness feel like? The answer is that there is no phenomenology of death, nothing it is like to die, no feeling of the end of consciousness. As Wittgenstein says, “Death is not an event […]
Immutability and Change Is change real? The question is of pre-Socratic antiquity and I probably have nothing new to say about it. Still, the truth is sufficiently strange to be worth reiterating: change is surprisingly absent from the world, more a matter of appearance than reality. Two things don’t change: particles and properties. The same […]
I am pleased to report that Cambridge Scholars Publishing has agreed to publish a volume entitled Colin McGinn’s Philosophy: Further Reflections, edited by Ken Levy. I cordially invite sundry “feminist” groups to send their letters of protest to the publisher and editor; I can promise we will have a good laugh at them.
Benefits of Cancellation Cancellation does have its upside. During the last ten years (it has been that long) I have had far more time to think, write philosophy, read (by choice), and pursue other interests. None of this would have been possible without ceasing to be a fulltime professor. This blog is one result. Not […]
Character and Consciousness It would be good to have a philosophy of character analogous to the philosophy of action or perception or emotion or thought or imagination or consciousness or the self. But we don’t. The subject hardly exists. I will take some steps to remedy that, focusing on the relationship between character and consciousness. […]