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

Misled

21 April 1988

Hilary Putnam (LRB, 21 April) quotes from a review I wrote of a book by Quine, originally published in the Journal of Philosophy. The first sentence of this quotation contains a printing error, perpetrated by Harvard University Press, and reproduced by Putnam (it isn’t his fault). The quotation, which appears on the back of Quine’s Quiddities, reads: ‘Quine pursues philosophical vision with an...
Letter

On the chin

4 May 1989

After reading Ian Hacking’s distressingly glancing, and airily dismissive, review of my book Mental Content (LRB, 4 May), I wondered whether I should write an indignant letter of reply to the LRB. But I decided not to bother – since it would be unnecessary for those within philosophy, and those outside it would only get the impression that the review contained points or arguments worth responding...
Letter

Keith’s Review

28 September 1989

Readers of Martin Amis’s London Fields may be interested in the following review, which recently came into my hands:Oi: top of his game innit. Touch of ‘genius’ as such. 180! 2000! Martin, words! Sincerity at the desk. Pen clinicism. Got me down to a tee like. That Nicky, phwhore!, I could murder that. Bull finish, no danger. Yeah cheers mate.I gather the review was rejected by the Sun Literary...
Letter

Old Scores

30 August 1990

In my review of A.J. Ayer’s The Meaning of Life, I made the point that postulating the existence of an afterlife to confer meaning on our mortal life is viciously regressive, since the question must arise as to the meaning of this alleged afterlife; and similarly for postulating God. I have since stumbled upon a passage in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus which must be making essentially the same point:Not...
Letter

Badoompa

10 January 1991

It is good at last to see the whole issue of the bass-player being addressed in your journal (LRB, 10 January), an issue you have scrupulously avoided in the past. However, I fear that Graham Coster merely perpetuates the common myth that exists about this grievously neglected element of the rock’n’roll band. He begins perceptively enough, observing that it is of course the drummer who makes the...

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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