Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn a reader in philosophy at University College London, is soon to take up the position of Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford. He is the author of Wittgenstein on Meaning.

Letter

Good Things

5 September 1996

Philippa Foot (Letters, 3 October) says that I ‘was wrong to suggest that Gavin Lawrence’s work is derived from [Warren] Quinn’s’. But I suggested no such thing: I said it was odd that Lawrence didn’t mention Quinn’s work in view of the similarity between them and their professional proximity. I had no information on the question of influence. After all, people do often cite each other...
Letter

Misrepresenting

2 December 1993

Hilary Putnam’s letter (Letters, 24 February) begins by stating that my review of his Renewing Philosophy ‘is in content not a book review, but a polemic, and as such requires a response’. I am unclear what distinction he intends here: surely my piece was simply a (highly) critical book review. The question is whether my description of his views was correct and whether my criticisms were justified....
Letter

Identicals are identical

19 August 1993

Howard Kahane (Letters, 7 October) has, I am afraid, wasted your column inches broadcasting his own confusions and misunderstandings. He announces that Davidson’s anomalous monism violates Leibniz’s law of the indiscernibility of identicals, so that the position is logically contradictory. Pause for a moment to reflect that if this were so the entire philosophical community would have failed for...
Letter

My Guy

6 August 1992

The name of the ‘hero’ of my novel The Space Trap is Alan, not Colin as Frank Kermode has it (LRB, 6 August); Alan’s son’s name is Colin. And this is not a matter of mere names, since I used my own name for the abandoned son with a certain point in mind. Oddly enough, a review of the novel in Time Out called my guy Alan Smith, not Alan Swift: but, unlike Frank Kermode’s piece, it was inaccurate...
Letter

Consciousness

27 June 1991

The friendliness and fairness of Jerry Fodor’s thoughtful review of my book The Problem of Consciousness, despite its variance with some of his own doctrines, makes me dither at the doors of dissent, but there are one or two points it might be helpful for me to comment on, if only for the real enthusiasts out there.First let me correct a slight inaccuracy in his description of the book: it doesn’t...

Pieces about Colin McGinn in the LRB

Avoiding Colin

Frank Kermode, 6 August 1992

Once there were popular books with titles like Straight and Crooked Thinking, books in which professional philosophers, avoiding arcane speculation, tried to make the rest of us more sensible by...

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Too hard for our kind of mind?

Jerry Fodor, 27 June 1991

Whatever, you may be wondering, became of the mind-body problem? This new collection of Colin McGinn’s philosophical papers is as good a place to find out as any I know of. Published over a...

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Putnam’s Change of Mind

Ian Hacking, 4 May 1989

Big issues and little issues: among established working philosophers there is none more gifted at making us think anew about both than Hilary Putnam. His latest book is motivated by large...

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An End to Anxiety

Barry Stroud, 18 July 1985

Wittgenstein predicted that his work would not be properly understood and appreciated. He said it was written in a different spirit from that of the main stream of European and American...

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Persons

Brian O’Shaughnessy, 1 April 1983

The philosophy of mind is a branch of the philosophy of nature. But it has this peculiarity, that the very item that conjures up its questions and vets its answers is the very part of nature...

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