Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn (born 10 March 1950) is a British philosopher. He has held teaching posts and professorships at the University College London, the University of Oxford, Rutgers University, and the University of Miami. McGinn is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind, and in particular, for what is known as new mysterianism, the idea that the human mind is not equipped to solve the problem of consciousness. 

He is the author of over 20 books on this and other areas of philosophy, including The Character of Mind (1982), The Problem of Consciousness (1991), Consciousness and Its Objects (2004), and The Meaning of Disgust (2011). In 2013, McGinn resigned from his tenured position at the University of Miami after being accused of sexual harassment by a female graduate student. The resignation touched off a debate about the prevalence of sexism and sexual harassment within academic philosophy.

McGinn was born in West Hartlepool, a town in County Durham, England. Several of his relatives, including both grandfathers, were miners. His father, Joseph, left school to become a miner but put himself through night school and became a building manager instead. McGinn was the eldest of three children, all sons. When he was three, the family moved to Gillingham, Kent, and eight years later to Blackpool, Lancashire. Having failed his 11-plus, he attended a technical school in Kent, then a secondary modern in Blackpool, but did well enough in his O-levels to be transferred to the local grammar school for his A-levels.

In 1968, he began a degree in psychology at the University of Manchester, obtaining a first-class honors degree in 1971 and an MA in 1972, also in psychology. He was admitted in 1972 to Jesus College, Oxford, at first to study for a Bachelor of Letters postgraduate degree. Still, he switched to the Bachelor of Philosophy (BPhil) postgraduate program on the recommendation of his advisor, Michael R. Ayers. In 1973, he was awarded the university's prestigious John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy; one of the examiners was A.J. Ayer. 

He received his BPhil in 1974, writing a thesis under the supervision of Michael R. Ayers and P. F. Strawson on the semantics of Donald Davidson. McGinn has written extensively on philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language but is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind. He is known in particular for the development of the idea that human minds are incapable of solving the problem of consciousness, a position known as new mysterianism. 

In addition to his academic publications on consciousness – including The Character of Mind (1982), The Problem of Consciousness (1991), and Consciousness and Its Objects (2004) – he has written a popular introduction, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (1999). Owen Flanagan introduced the term "new mysterious" in 1991 (named after Question Mark & the Mysterians, a 1960s band) to describe McGinn's position and that of Thomas Nagel, first described in Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974).

McGinn introduced his position in "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?" (Mind, 1989) and in The Problem of Consciousness (1991), arguing that the human mind is incapable of comprehending itself entirely.[16] Mark Rowlands writes that the 1989 article was largely responsible for reviving the debate about phenomenal consciousness or the nature of experience. McGinn argued in the paper for the idea of cognitive closure: A type of mind M is cognitively closed with respect to a property P (or theory T) if and only if the concept-forming procedures at M's disposal cannot extend to a grasp of P (or an understanding of T). 

Conceiving minds come in different kinds, equipped with varying powers and limitations, biases and blindspots, so that properties (or theories) may be accessible to some minds but not to others. What is closed to the mind of a rat may be open to the mind of a monkey, and what is open to us may be closed to the monkey. ... But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind.

Although human beings might grasp the concept of consciousness, McGinn argues that we cannot understand its causal basis: neither direct examination of consciousness nor of the brain can identify the properties that cause or provide the mechanism for consciousness, or how "technicolor phenomenology [can] arise from soggy grey matter." Thus, his answer to the hard problem of consciousness is that the answer is inaccessible to us.

New, or epistemological, materialism is contrasted with the old, or ontological, form, namely that consciousness is inherently mysterious or supernatural. The new mysterians are not Cartesian dualists. The argument holds that human minds cannot understand consciousness, not that there is anything supernatural about it. The mind-body problem is simply "the perimeter of our conceptual anatomy making itself felt." McGinn describes this as existential naturalism.