Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn (born 1950) is a British philosopher currently working at the University of Miami, after leaving Rutgers University following more than decade there. McGinn was educated in the fields of metaphysics and philosophy of mind, although he has written on subjects as diverse as ethics and its relation to fiction, and how movies interact with mind. His most accessible and perhaps his most famous book among the general public is his autobiography, The Making of a Philosopher.

He has written many influential books on mind, perhaps most influentially The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (2000). He is primarily known for promoting the view known as "New Mysterianism", which is a view in philosophy of mind that states that the human mind is fundamentally incapable of comprehending itself entirely. This is his explanation as to why we humans have had such difficulty understanding our own consciousness. McGinn's answer to the hard problem of consciousness is that humans are ultimately unable to find the answer.

His next book addresses philosophy in Shakespeare's works.

External links

• Colin McGinn's Bio (and Bibliography) at Rutgers
• Conscious Entities — Colin McGinn
• Colin McGinn in ZhurnalWiki — a review of his autobiography
• "Apes, Humans, Aliens, Vampires and Robots". In Paola Cavalieri & Peter Singer (eds.), The Great Ape Project, New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1993, pp. 146-151.
• The Atheism Tapes, program 1 — the transcript of an extended interview with Colin McGinn for the Jonathan Miller BBC TV series The Atheism Tapes.

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