User:Tomwsulcer/United States Congress

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Note: this is a SANDBOX page -- that means that this page is mostly unviewed by the public but is a trial page before adding material

In this sandbox, Colin McGinn, also list of Great Courses... In history, previous version of revamp of Character actor In history, previous version of Christine Horner MD In history, repeated AfDs of Miss Universe

AfD charting[edit]

Table title here
Article Nominator Status
Anastasia Chernova The Banner keep 0 delete
Sheillah Molelekwa The Banner keep 0 delete
Adrienne Murphy The Banner Keep
Tsakana Nkandih The Banner 1 keep 1 delete
Celeste Marshall The Banner 1 keep 1 delete
Winfrida Dominic The Banner 1 keep 1 delete
Camila Vezzoso The Banner 2 keep 1 delete
Farah Eslaquit The Banner 3 keep 2 delete
Andrea Radonjić The Banner 2 keep 1 delete
Ayako Hara The Banner 4 keep 1 delete
Zhana Yaneva The Banner Keep
Marie-Noëlle Ada The Banner 0 keep 0 delete
Laura Godoy The Banner 2 keep 0 delete
Sara Chafak The Banner Keep
Lindsay Japal The Banner 1 keep 1 delete
Abigail Hyndman The Banner Keep
Yéssica Mouton The Banner 1 keep 1 delete 1 redirect
Laura Beyne The Banner 2 keep 1 delete
Marcelina Vahekeni The Banner 3 keep 1 delete 1 redirect

Wikipedia requires that steps be taken before nominating articles for deletion, such as taking "reasonable steps to search for reliable sources". It appears as if The Banner has been rapid-fire AfDing numerous articles without taking such steps (see chart). Perhaps it is done to advance a personal anti-beauty contestant agenda? As of Sept. 14, 2014, there have been numerous beauty contestant articles AfD-ed; as best I can tell, not one has resulted in a deletion decision, although many decisions are still pending. It appears to myself, Trackinfo as was noted here and Milowent as was noted here that these are bad-faith nominations, done without the requisite preparatory steps. These mindless and unnecessary nominations result in time-wasting fuss. My sense is The Banner should either be banned from editing or blocked from AfDing any articles.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 14:16, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Human rights[edit]

xxxxx During modern history, the concept of rights has been closely intertwined semantically with the concept of citizenship, and only meant something within a region's borders, and as a way to justify the sovereignty of the state, according to analyst Samuel Moyn.[1]


xxxxx Analyst Gary J. Bass wrote that the general sense of human rights is a "combination of universalism, empathy, equality, rule of law, and national or international enforcement mechanisms."[2]

xxxx Bass sees historical development of the conception of human rights based on a response to the gruesome horrors of history, a way to care about victims with a "universalistic conception of humanity" requiring human empathy, such that government policy was guided by morality.[2]

xxxThe human rights movement has been associated with anti-slavery activism in the nineteenth century in Europe and in the United States, as well as efforts by reformer Alexander II of Russia to end serfdom in Russia in 1861.[2]

xxx According to Bass, most human rights activism happens within a country's borders, by people pressing for their own rights in their own countries.[2]

xxxx Bass sees the movement to embrace human rights as reactions to slavery, torture, genocide, and war crimes.[2]

xxxxx Analyst Belinda Cooper in The New York Times argues that human rights organizations flourished in the 1990s, possibly as a result of the dissolution of the two Cold War blocs, the western and eastern.[3]

xxx[4]xxx


xxxx They are inherent in all human beings, regardless of what nation we belong to, where we live, our gender, our national or ethnic origin, or any other status such as skin color, religion, or language.[4]


xxxThey are written in both national and international law, and in treaties between nations.[4]

xxx The principle of human rights is at the core of human rights laws.[4]

xxxx Human rights can not be stripped from a person, except based on specific circumstances and as a result of due process; for example, if a person is convicted of a crime by a court of law, then he or she could lose their human right of liberty.[4]

xxxx While the United Nations requires state governments to "respect, protect, and fulfill human rights."[4]

xxxxx According to the United Nations, human rights brings about an obligation that people respect the human rights of others.[4]

xxxx A report in Foreign Affairs by analyst Pierre N. Leval suggested that respect for fundamental human rights in the world today is "dismal", although better than two hundred years ago.

xxxx

Despotic regimes murder, mutilate, and rape civilian populations and arbitrarily imprison and torture political opponents. Human traffickers, almost invariably operating with the protection of corrupt local officials and police, enslave children and young women in the sex trade. So long as the regimes that sponsor and protect these criminals remain in power, their crimes go unrecognized.

— Pierre N. Leval in Foreign Affairs, 2013[5]

Leval argues that human rights protections according to international law are ineffective in prevention violations by abusive governments.[5]

xxx Merriam-Webster dictionary defines human rights as freedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture, and execution, regarded as belonging fundamentally to all persons.[6]

xxx The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines human rights as "norms that help to protect all people everywhere from severe political, legal, and social abuses."[7]

xxxx The history of human rights can be traced to documents in the past, particularly the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution (1791).[7]

xxxx It argues that human rights are rights, most often claim rights which impose duties or responsibilities on their dutyholders, and claim a "freedom, protection, status, or benefit for the rightholders," according to this view.[7]

xxxx Human rights are not limited to one specific type of right, but encompass a variety of rights such as the right to a fair trial, the abolition of slavery, ensuring that education is available to everybody, and prohibiting genocide, although there is disagreement about the scope of human rights, and which particular rights should be included within the general framework of human rights.[7]

xxxx Human rights belong to all living persons, that is, they are universal.[7]

xxxx Many thinkers suggest that human rights should be a minimum requirement, with the idea being to avoid the worst-case abuses rather than striving to achieve ideal situations.[7]

xxxx Macmillan Dictionary defines human rights as "the rights that everyone should have in a society, including the right to express opinions about the government or to have protection from harm".[8]


xxxx The Encyclopædia Britannica defines human rights as "rights that belong to an individual or group of individuals simply for being human, or as a consequence of inherent human vulnerability, or because they are requisite to the possibility of a just society."[9]

xxx They refer to a "wide continuum of values or capabilities thought to enhance human agency or protect human interests".[9]

xxx They are universal in the sense of being claimed for all humans, both present and future.[9]

xxxx The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is generally viewed as the preeminent statement of international rights in the sense being a culmination of centuries of thinking along both secular and religious lines.[10]

xxxx Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann argues that human rights became more widely emphasized in the latter half of the twentieth century because it "provided a language for political claim making and counter-claims, liberal-democratic, but also socialist and postcolonialist.[11]


References[edit]

  1. ^ Samuel Moyn, August 30-September 6, 2010 edition, The Nation, Human Rights in History: Human rights emerged not in the 1940s but the 1970s, and on the ruins of prior dreams, Retrieved Aug. 14, 2014
  2. ^ a b c d e Gary J. Bass (book reviewer), Samuel Moyn (author of book being reviewed), OCTOBER 20, 2010, The New Republic, The Old New Thing, Retrieved Aug. 14, 2014
  3. ^ Belinda Cooper (book reviewer), September 24, 2010, The New York Times, New Birth of Freedom, Retrieved Aug. 14, 2014
  4. ^ a b c d e f g The United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, What are human rights?, Retrieved Aug. 14, 2014
  5. ^ a b Pierre N. Leval, March-April 2013, Foreign Affairs magazine, The Long Arm of International Law: Giving Victims of Human Rights Abuses Their Day in Court, Retrieved Aug. 14, 2014
  6. ^ Merriam-Webster dictionary, [1], Retrieved Aug. 14, 2014, "rights (as freedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture, and execution) regarded as belonging fundamentally to all persons"
  7. ^ a b c d e f James Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, Dec 13, 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Human Rights, Retrieved Aug. 14, 2014
  8. ^ Macmillan Dictionary, human rights - definition, Retrieved Aug. 14, 2014, "the rights that everyone should have in a society, including the right to express opinions about the government or to have protection from harm"
  9. ^ a b c Burns H. Weston, March 20, 2014, Encyclopedia Britannica, human rights, Retrieved Aug. 14, 2014
  10. ^ The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era, Micheline R. Ishay, copyright 2004 and 2008, University of California Press, Early Ethical Contributions, Retrieved Aug. 14, 2014, (see page 18 near top of page) "...The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the preeminent document of international rights summarizing secular and religious notions of rights that had evolved throughout the centuries...."
  11. ^ Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights, Retrieved Aug. 14, 2014 (see page 2)

Additions for checking[edit]

  • Harvard University. <in history section Sept 2013.> In 2012, roughly 125 Harvard College students were investigated for cheating on a take-home final examination in a course about the Congress;[1] in 2013, a survey by the Harvard Crimson found that 10% of incoming freshmen had cheated on an exam prior to attending the university, and 42% had cheated on a homework assignment.[2]


Experimenting[edit]

this is to see how the reference mahickety thingie works.: page 67  Piece of information number one but now the same reference to the book but pointing to a different page number, say, page number 22: (p.22)  and now the same book but a different page number, say page number 67: page 67  now let's see if it works.

First thingie with a note afterwards.[3] It was the only compound-expansion locomotive on the NBR and one of just three tandem compounds in Britain.[4] And the other principal dimensions were: cylinders 17 in (430 mm) diameter by 24 in (610 mm) stroke; coupled wheelbase 7 ft 7 in (2,310 mm).[3]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ "College announces investigation | Harvard Gazette". News.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2012-09-04.
  2. ^ Simon Moya-Smith, Sept. 6, 2013, NBC News, Survey: 42 percent of Harvard's incoming freshman class cheated on homework, Accessed Sep. 6, 2013
  3. ^ a b Schudson 1987, p. 195.
  4. ^ Schudson 1987, pp. 260, 262.

References[edit]

Note Earl Killian stuff is in a previous page

Note Lake Keowee stuff on previous page too

Note Colin McGinn stuff on previous page

Note list of Teaching Co & Modern Scholar courses here too previously


Colin McGinn
Born (1950-03-10) March 10, 1950 (age 74)
West Hartlepool, England
Era21st-century philosophy
RegionWestern Philosophy
SchoolAnalytic[1][2]
Main interests
Philosophy of mind · [2] Logic
Philosophy of literature
Notable ideas
New Mysterianism

Colin McGinn (born March 10, 1950) is a prominent[3] British analytic philosopher[4] currently teaching at the University of Miami. He is notable for being a recognized expert on issues of consciousness[5][6] and for being a prolific author and prominent figure in popular philosophy.[6][7][8] McGinn has taught at University College London,[2] Oxford,[2] Rutgers,[9][10][2] and the University of Miami.[2] While he has written on diverse topics in modern philosophy including popular cinema,[11][12] sports,[13][14] creativity,[15] Shakespeare,[16][17] personal memoirs, he may be best known for his work about consciousness[18][19] and the philosophy of mind[20] in which he argues that humans can never understand consciousness because we are "trapped" within it, according to one description of McGinn's position.[21][22] He is an advocate of atheism.[23][24][25] He has been described as an engaging speaker and writer[26] who often writes for a general audience,[26] and his writing style has been described as "lucid",[11][27] "clear," "enjoyable,"[7] [16] "charming",[13] "readable",[28] "illuminating",[29][21] "studiously commonsensical"[30] "brilliant,"[29] with "looseness and dash"[6] and "multilayered intensity,"[6] although his sometimes highly critical book reviews[31][10] of the books of other philosophers have led to controversy, including a long-running public feud with philosopher Ted Honderich.[5]

Early life[edit]

Colin McGinn was born in West Hartlepool in England in 1950[32] into a poor mining family.[1] He enrolled in Manchester University[1] where he studied Bertrand Russell,[1] whom he compared at one point to John Lennon,[27] and Jean-Paul Sartre.[1] He initially studied psychology and in 1971 wrote a thesis focusing on the ideas of Noam Chomsky, but he switched to philosophy as a postgraduate. In 1972, he was admitted into Oxford's postgraduate Bachelor of Letters programme and later into its Bachelor of Philosophy programme. He was admitted into the B.Phil programme after his advisor, Michael R. Ayers, recommended him. He won the John Locke Prize in 1972. He wrote a thesis supervised by P. F. Strawson which focused on the semantics of Donald Davidson and graduated in 1974 with a B.Phil degree. McGinn later described Oxford as a "philosophical hothouse" marked by debates characterized by "respectful rudeness" where "fools are skewered gladly."[1] McGinn was influenced by versions of empiricism and logical positivism and "ordinary language philosophy" and the impact of the philosopher Wittgenstein.[1]

Academic career[edit]

In 1974, McGinn taught philosophy at University College in London. He moved to United States where he found an "enhancement of intellectual stimulation".[27] In 1980, he taught two semesters at UCLA as a visiting professor. Later, he succeeded Gareth Evans as Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford University.[1] In 1988, he taught one term at the City University of New York, and later that year taught at Rutgers University until 2006, and then became a full-time professor at the University of Miami. Reviewer Matthew F. Rose wrote that McGinn's career "combined a relish for the exacting rigor of logical and linguistic analysis with an awareness of the bottomless mystery that is man's inner life."[1] McGinn became a proponent of analytic philosophy which favors ignoring idealism, vitalism, Platonism and transcendentalism and instead focusing on "observable actions and language."[1] Philosopher Steven Pinker described McGinn as "an ingenious philosopher who thinks like a laser and writes like a dream."[29]

Philosophy[edit]

Consciousness and the Mind-Body problem[edit]

Although McGinn has written dozens of articles in philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, he is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind. In his 1989 article "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?", he speculated that the human mind is innately incapable of comprehending itself entirely, and that this incapacity spawns the puzzles of consciousness which are "beyond the rim of human intellectual competence"[18] that have preoccupied Western philosophy since Descartes. Thus, McGinn's answer to the hard problem of consciousness is that humans cannot find the answer, a position described by several sources as pessimistic.[33][10] He wrote that hi-tech instruments such as PET scans "only give us the physical basis of consciousness, not consciousness as it exists for the person whose consciousness it is."[34] He compared the human brain to meat and wonders how can "brain meat" think?[34][35] He believes there is an explanation about how 'brain meat' can result in thinking, but he does not believe that humans will ever understand it.[18] One insurmountable difficulty blocking human understanding is that the "property of consciousness itself" is not an "observable or perceptible property of the brain," according to McGinn.[36]

McGinn's position has been termed the New Mysterianism. One writer noted how several of McGinn's philosophy colleagues with similar views were based in New Jersey, including philosophers Jerry Fodor and Thomas Nagel, and described the group as advocating a New Jersey Nihilism.[37] According to one report, thinkers such as Noam Chomsky and John Searle have been described as Mysterians but that McGinn is the "leading figure" of this approach although it is not an organized group.[38] McGinn's 2000 book The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World[10] is a non-technical exposition of his theory.[9] He argued that humans will never be able to fully understand human consciousness[6] which will forever be a "deep mystery" that humans will "never unravel"[6] and that humans are "cognitively closed" to understanding such a problem.[39][40] However, a report in The Economist criticized him for not exploring the possibility that the human tendency to think of "mind" and "matter" as different could itself create a "false illusion of mind-brain difference."[8]

McGinn described consciousness as a natural phenomenon which mysteriously emerges from its roots in the physical brain.[6] Reviewer Galen Strawson writing in The New York Times described The Mysterious Flame as a "popular work" notable for "constantly provoking questions and objections" while also containing a number of original ideas.[6] Consistent with his view of the impossibility of understanding consciousness, McGinn argued that it is impossible for humans to build machines that can think,[41] and compared such a task with "slugs trying to do Freudian psychoanalysis" since, in both cases, the machines and slugs lack the proper conceptual equipment. McGinn wondered how:

the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness.

— Colin McGinn, 2007[42][43]

McGinn compared the task of describing consciousness to asking a color-blind person to understand the sensation of seeing red.[44] McGinn and colleague Steven Pinker explained human inability to solve the Mind-body problem on the grounds that such problem solving ability was not required for evolutionary survival. Since humans did not need such mental capacity to survive, they did not evolve the intelligence to understand it, according to this argument, in the same way that "armadillos did not evolve the ability to understand arithmetic."[45][46] McGinn asserted his view that the constraints on human cognition will cause science to someday "reach its limits."[47]

Atheism[edit]

McGinn is an outspoken and steadfast supporter of atheism. He was interviewed in Jonathan Miller's documentary mini-series entitled Brief History of Disbelief which focused on the history of atheism. He discussed the philosophy of belief as well as his own positions as an antitheist. According to two reports, McGinn compared God to Santa Claus on the basis that there were reasonable arguments supporting the position that neither exists.[24][48]

Writing[edit]

McGinn's literary style is similar in some respects to a 1950s writing approach known as The Movement which was characterized by a neutral tone and lacking "patrician cultural pretensions".[30] McGinn was quoted as linking The Movement with "ordinary language philosophy."[30] He wrote:

The challenge is to cast difficult ideas in a form that is so limpidly stated, so direct and accessible, that it sets off small explosions of illumination in the reader's mind. I suppose, like many another writer, I want my own inner intensity to communicate itself to the mind of others; I want them to feel a glow of comprehension, of achieved insight. I want that inner bookworm to shine.

— Colin McGinn, 2003[49]

One reviewer suggested that McGinn helps us to "wonder at how strange the world is" in a style "lightened by wit and not burdened by jargon."[34]

Other subjects[edit]

McGinn has written on numerous subjects. McGinn's 2002 book The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy was an account of his formative years in academia which one reviewer praised for its "obvious learning and intellectual rigour" but criticized it for not revealing enough of McGinn's personal side.[27] In his 1997 book Ethics, Evil, and Fiction, McGinn argued that studying literature was important to understanding ethical themes, and that human knowledge of right and wrong was "aesthetically motivated."[26] He wrote:

In fiction we can put an ethical idea through its paces, testing its ability to command our assent.... We can face moral reality in all its complexity and drama. The fictional work can make us see and feel good and evil in a way that no philosophical tract can.

— Colin McGinn, 1997[26]

McGinn explored popular cinema in his 2005 book The Power of Movies, which included analogies such as "watching movies is like having sex, with the movie as the dominant partner",[50] and in which he compared films to dreams.[4] He argued that movies help people to "enter an altered state of consciousness."[51] This book received mixed reviews.[50][51] His 2008 nanobook Mindfucking was described as readable but led reviewer Steven Poole to ask "What isn't mindfucking"?[28] McGinn wrote a science-fiction novel entitled The Space Trap in 1992.

McGinn has written scathing reviews of selected philosophy books. His review of Ted Honderich’s On Consciousness in July 2007 erupted into a "very public feud" described by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian as a "prize fight ... among the showiest brawlers in the philosophy dojo."[52] McGinn wrote a negative review of a book by Oliver Sacks which was described by Sacks as:

the most murderous review I have ever received in my life ... he had vivisected me, skinned me alive...

— Oliver Sacks, describing McGinn's review of Sacks' book.[10]

Later, Sacks and McGinn became friends, according to one report.[10]

McGinn's political positions have been identified with Western liberalism, according to one account, which identified similarities between his positions and those of philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Robert Nozick.[20] In his book How To Do The Right Thing, McGinn favors:

  • ethical treatment of animals[20]
  • abortion less desirable as the fetus develops[20]
  • violence should never be the first choice[20]
  • sexual practices and drug-taking should be largely left up to consenting individuals[20]
  • censorship is bad[20]

About altruism, McGinn wrote:

What if you took every penny you ever had and gave it to the poor of Africa, as he would have us do? What we would have is no economy, no ability to generate new wealth or help anybody.

— Colin McGinn, 1999[53]

In The Meaning of Disgust, McGinn speculated that disgust might have arisen as a restraint on early humans who were inclined to copulate with corpses or eat feces.[2] He wrote:

Disgust occurs in that ambiguous territory between life and death, when both conditions are present in some form: It is not life per se or death per se that disgusts, but their uneasy juxtaposition.

— McGinn, in The Meaning of Disgust[2]


Personal life[edit]

McGinn enjoys participating in various sports.[27]

Books[edit]

A partial list of books by Colin McGinn:

  • Mindfucking (2008). Acumen, ISBN 1-84465-114-2.
  • Sport (2008). Acumen. ISBN: 1844651487[14]
  • Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (2006). HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-085615-7.
  • The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (2005). Pantheon, ISBN 0-375-42317-6.
  • Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning (2004). Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-01560-6.
  • Consciousness and Its Objects (2004). Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-926760-X.
  • The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy (2002). HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-019792-7 (first edition). (Reprint edition, 2003, Harper Perennial, ISBN 0-06-095760-3.)
  • Logical Properties: Identity, Existence, Predication, Necessity, Truth (2001). Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-924181-3.
  • The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (1999). Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-01422-4.
  • Knowledge and Reality: Selected Papers (1998). Oxford University Press.
  • Ethics, Evil and Fiction (1997). Oxford University Press.
  • Minds and Bodies: Philosophers and Their Ideas (1997). Oxford University Press.
  • Problems in Philosophy: the Limits of Inquiry (1993). Blackwell.[54]
  • The Space Trap (1992). Duckworth.
  • Moral Literacy: Or How To Do The Right Thing (1992). Duckworth. Hackett, 1993.
  • The Problem of Consciousness (1991). Basil Blackwell.
  • Mental Content (1989). Basil Blackwell.
  • Wittgenstein on Meaning (1984). Basil Blackwell.
  • The Subjective View: Secondary Qualities and Indexical Thoughts (1983). Oxford University Press.
  • The Character of Mind (1982). Oxford University Press. (Second edition, 1997.)
  • The Meaning of Disgust[2]

Selected articles[edit]

A partial list of articles by Colin McGinn (emphasis on scholarly philosophical articles):

  • "Another Look at Colour" (1996). Journal of Philosophy.
  • "Consciousness and Space" (1995). Journal of Consciousness Studies.
  • "The Problem of Philosophy" (1994). Philosophical Studies.
  • "Must I Be Morally Perfect?" (1992). Analysis.
  • "Conceptual Causation: Some Elementary Reflections" (1991). Mind.
  • "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?" Mind, 1989.
  • "What is the Problem of Other Minds?" (1984). Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
  • "Two Notions of Realism?" (1983). Philosophical Topics.
  • "Realist Semantics and Content Ascription" (1982). Synthese.
  • "Rigid Designation and Semantic Value" (1982). Philosophical Quarterly.
  • "Philosophical Materialism" (1980). Synthese
  • "An A Priori Argument for Realism" (1979). The Journal of Philosophy.
  • "Single-case Probability and Logical Form" (1979). Mind.
  • "Charity, Interpretation and Belief" (1977). The Journal of Philosophy.
  • "Semantics for Nonindicative Sentences" (1977). Philosophical Studies.
  • "A Priori and A Posteriori Knowledge" (1976). Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
  • "A Note on the Frege Argument" (1976). Mind.
  • "On the Necessity of Origin" (1976). The Journal of Philosophy.
  • "A Note on the Essence of Natural Kinds" (1975). Analysis.
  • "Mach and Husserl" (1972). Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology.

External links[edit]

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Colin McGinn

References[edit]

  • McGinn, Colin. (2002). The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy. HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-019792-7 (first edition). (Reprint edition, 2003, Harper Perennial, ISBN 0-06-095760-3.)
  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Rose, Matthew F. (January 1, 2003). "The disconsolate philosopher.(The Making of a Philosopher by Colin McGinn)(Book Review)". Institute on Religion and Public Life via Highbeam Research. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ... Colin McGinn's ... analytical philosophy.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i Corbin, Ian Marcus (April 1, 2012). "The Meaning of Disgust BY COLIN MCGINN". Institute on Religion and Public Life via Highbeam Research. Retrieved 2012-10-27. McGinn made his name as an analytic philosopher of mind, teaching at University College London, Oxford, Rutgers, and now the University of Miami.
  3. ^ Jonathan Miller (June 15, 2011). "Skeptical perspectives on the Universe and God's existence". Skeptic Magazine. Retrieved 2012-10-27. In these revealing interviews the neurologist turned playwright, filmmaker and self-described atheist Jonathan Miller filmed conversations with six of today's leading men of science and letters, including: the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the philosophers Daniel Dennett and Colin McGinn, the playwright Arthur Miller, the theologian Denys Turner, and the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg. These distinguished thinkers discuss their personal intellectual journeys and offer illuminating analyses of belief and disbelief from a wide range of perspectives. Compelling viewing you won't want to miss.
  4. ^ a b Gilberto Perez (March 27, 2006). "The Dream Life". The Nation. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Colin McGinn's new book on the movies doesn't just say that they draw inspiration from dreams, or that they have a dreamlike effect on the audience, or even that, as Buñuel thought, they are the medium best suited to imitate the workings of the dreaming mind. McGinn, who dealt with dreams and other mental images in his recent Mindsight, asserts in The Power of Movies that necessarily, not through the talent or inclination of their makers but by the intrinsic character of their medium, films are like dreams. A philosopher of the analytic school, which aspires to the scientific, he puts forward the analogy between watching a film and having a dream as a sweeping proposition, tantamount to a law of nature, and he aims to render "the points of analogy...precise and illuminating, not mere vague metaphors." He pushes the analogy to the limit, where the images on the screen lose all bodily mooring and become sheer figments of our imagination, indistinguishable from the images we dream. No one else has held so single-mindedly to the notion that film is a medium of mind.
  5. ^ a b PATRICIA COHEN (January 12, 2008). "The Nature of Reasons: Two Philosophers Feud Over a Book Review". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ... Mr. McGinn had been chosen to review the book, published in 2004, because "he is a recognized expert on issues of consciousness." ...
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h GALEN STRAWSON (July 11, 1999). "Little Gray Cells: A philosopher examines human consciousness and argues that the mind is too ill equipped to understand it". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-10-27. There is no more interesting and inventive British philosopher writing today than Colin McGinn, who is currently teaching at Rutgers University. Recently he has begun to acquire a reputation for intellectual raffishness, and some philosophers, having learned a great deal from him on a very wide range of subjects for over 20 years, now like to put him down as too careless, too breezy, too coarse. But they keep up with his views, if they have any sense. He has a remarkable gift for developing new holds on old problems by shifting arguments and thought-experiments familiar in one area to another where nobody has thought of applying them.
  7. ^ a b Nartonis, David K. (August 5, 1999). "The problem of thought is tougher than we think; Redrawing the distinction between brain and mind.(Features)(Ideas)(Books)". The Christian Science Monitor via Highbeam Research. Retrieved 2012-10-27. If all philosophy books were as clear and enjoyable as this one, more people would read them. After all, philosophers like author Colin McGinn do tackle a lot of subjects that really interest us.
  8. ^ a b "THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME: CONSCIOUS MINDS IN A MATERIAL WORLD. By Colin McGinn. Basic Books; 224 pages; $24. Plymbridge; 18.50Some philosophers have begun to despair about science's ability to explain human consciousness. This may be premature". The Economist via Highbeam Research. May 1, 1999. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ...Humans, after all, have a particular mode of introspective access to their conscious states, as Mr McGinn himself emphasises. But he fails to explore the possibility that this particular way of thinking creates a false illusion of mind-brain difference, and that this impression may be responsible for the other conundrums which surround the scientific study of consciousness. If philosophers are going to help consciousness studies find a way forward, perhaps they will do better to reflect on the way humans think about their conscious selves, rather than simply giving up in despair. ...
  9. ^ a b "Books". Los Angeles Times. April 8, 2001. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Piercing the Veil of Ignorance COLIN MCGINN, Colin McGinn is the author of "The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World," 'The Character of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind" and "Ethics, Evil and Fiction." He is professor of philosophy at Rutgers University
  10. ^ a b c d e f Andrew Brown (4 March 2005). "Seeing double". The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Only one man gave it a really bad review, and that was Colin McGinn, a philosopher at Rutgers University, New Jersey. McGinn's professional interest in the mind/body problem runs parallel to Sacks's interest in brains and minds. McGinn is notorious among philosophers of consciousness for his pessimism, set out in such books as The Mysterious Flame (1999). He doesn't deny that there may be a scientific explanation that will unite our scientific knowledge of the brain with our experience of having minds, but there is no good reason to suppose that we can find it, he argues, and quite good ones to suppose we can't. He had two complaints, he now says, about the book: that Sacks, in his preface, had described the stories as being "at the intersection of fact and fable", and it was unclear which bits were which; and that the style was rather luxuriant and sentimental. He also praised, and continues to praise, the effort to get inside the minds of these people, not to be "scientistic and behaviouristic". Curiously, Sacks remembers this as "the most murderous review I have ever received in my life ... he had vivisected me, skinned me alive"; but some years later he had forgotten the author; and, when he was flying to Australia, picked up a book of McGinn's for the 20-hour flight and was entranced. He wrote him a fan letter. The two met and became friends; after a few months, a shadow appeared across this friendship when Sacks realised his new friend was also the man who had wounded him so terribly.
  11. ^ a b Wyatt Mason (book reviewer) (January 22, 2006). "Alone in the Dark (review of 'The Power of Movies,' by Colin McGinn)". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ... lucid, rewarding writer...
  12. ^ David Denby (November 10, 2003). "The Current Cinema: When Worlds Collide -- movie review of The Matrix Revolutions..." The New Yorker. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Not much philosophy there," a real-world philosopher, Colin McGinn, of Rutgers, said to me after a screening of "The Matrix Revolutions" last week.
  13. ^ a b BILL HAYES (April 21, 2012). "Plato's Body, and Mine". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-10-27. The contemporary philosopher (and self-admitted sports nut) Colin McGinn points out that physical education should be a lifelong pursuit. "We like our minds to be knowledgeable, well-stocked with information; we should also want our bodies to be similarly endowed," he writes in his charming book "Sport." "The erudite body is a good body to have."
  14. ^ a b Will Robins (book reviewer) (2009). "Sport by Colin McGinn". Philosophy Now. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Acumen, 2008, 144 pps. pb, £9.99, ISBN: 1844651487. Part of Acumen's 'Art of Living' series, Sport by Colin McGinn is aimed at a level somewhere between the casual and the academic: something that the uninitiated could grapple with, but which would still be perfectly acceptable for a university professor to read on her day off. The book takes personal experience as its starting point, beginning with the school ­yard game of 'faggies', moving on to gymnastics, kayaking and tennis, among many others. It analyses the author's athletic excursions by using techniques borrowed from a range of disciplines and thinkers. McGinn does tend to use autobiographical narrative as a crutch when he needs to finish a chapter or flesh out a smaller point. While one cannot use this to criticize too harshly a book that states on page one that it will follow the form of a memoir rather than a straight topic-by-topic analysis, one feels that the memoir theme is invoked rather too easily when there could often have been some deeper analysis of a chapter's more interesting philosophical points. Perhaps McGinn suffers from a lack of confidence – not in his powers as a philosopher, but as a purveyor of sport. Although he repeatedly extols the virtues of competition, there is a telling story from his youth – a defeat by a known inferior gymnast – which may explain a preference for sporting activities that are best enjoyed alone. Yet I do not think he lacks confidence as a sportsman per se – in fact he explicitly challenges any reviewer who says so to a sporting showdown. McGinn is no sporting solipsist: he continually stresses the importance of others – willing rivals, coaches, team mates and training buddies. But he is an inveterate sporting polygamist: as soon as he begins to master a discipline, he moves on to another one. Is it the belief that he cannot excel which holds him back? This is what this book is about: the phenomenology of learning a sport. The most keenly argued sections of the book are concerned with what it is like to acquire skills available to us exclusively though the family of activities we call 'sports'. As a philosopher who has learnt a greater range of sports than most people, McGinn can speak with some authority on what it is like to progress from novice to expert. In this respect it is intriguing to read about his travails. Sport really is an anthology of learning, and, as an educator himself, this fits McGinn as snugly as his gymnast's leotard. Indeed, each account is retold in an honest and humorous manner which only occasionally breaks rhythm. McGinn could have been braver in exploring more deeply some of the astute philosophical assertions he makes on a topic that really has not attracted much philosophical attention before now. Things he says about the ethics of competition, the aesthetics of movement, learning, the relationship between our bodies and the world, and value and meaning – even abortive attempts to offer a definition of 'sport' – stopped tantalisingly short of full blown analysis. But then there is only so much ink in the world. As a member of that very restricted set of people, the sportsman-philosopher, it is a true joy to have on my shelf a book full of tools with which to think about and philosophically discuss something which plays a huge role in my life. {{cite news}}: soft hyphen character in |quote= at position 415 (help)
  15. ^ Steven Poole (19 April 2012). "Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer – review". The Guardian -- A self-regarding how-to guide through the creative process. Retrieved 2012-10-27. The amazing presumption of Lehrer's description, the shattering banality of its explanation, and its mystifying stupidity are all entirely characteristic of a phenomenon best branded "neuroscientism". (The term has been employed by the philosopher Colin McGinn and the critical neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, among others.)
  16. ^ a b John Cruickshank (reviewer) (October 8, 2006). "Shakespeare's Philosophy By Colin McGinn". Chicago Sun-Times via Highbeam Research. Retrieved 2012-10-27. British academic philosopher Colin McGinn has written a clear, spare book that illuminates Shakespeare's role as a thinker in his time -- and for all time.
  17. ^ Carlin Romano (May 6, 2007). "Shakespeare's Philosophy By Colin McGinn". The Philadelphia Inquirer via Highbeam Research. Retrieved 2012-10-27. In contrast, Shakespeare's Philosophy, by the analytic philosopher and popularizer Colin McGinn, insists on a pinched approach to Shakespeare's corpus that sinks his readings.
  18. ^ a b c Roger Caldwell (2006). "How To Be Conscious: Mind & Matter Revisited". Philosophy Now. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Three new books by long-standing practitioners in the field – Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and Colin McGinn – offer three very different views. The oddity is that all three start from what is essentially the same standpoint, that of scientific naturalism. That is, all three believe that human consciousness is dependent on brain-states, and that it has emerged by essentially Darwinian mechanisms as a natural (rather than supernatural) feature of the world. But that is where the consensus ends.
  19. ^ Jeanne Warren (2004). "Macmurray and Consciousness". Philosophy Now. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Thus, consciousness is a term used to talk about what it is that distinguishes us from other animals. Colin McGinn, quoted by Mary Midgley, goes back and forth across the boundary of the two meanings. When he says "The problem is how any collection of cells ... could generate a conscious being" he could just as well be talking about any animal, about the mystery of life, which is indeed hard to explain. But he then uses the word 'mind', which tends to move us on to homo sapiens, although not necessarily. (Do animals have minds?) The fog of confusion has been thickened rather than dispersed. Mary Midgley rightly says that we should re-state the problem. She, at least, is clear that she is talking specifically about us humans, whom she rightly terms 'persons'.
  20. ^ a b c d e f g Nicholas Everitt (reviewer) (1993). "Moral Literacy: or How To Do The Right Thing by Colin McGinn". Philosophy Now. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Colin McGinn is best known for his demanding texts in the philosophy of mind, so to see his name on this work is a double surprise, both of topic and of level. For this is very much a beginner's guide, a guide not so much to moral philosophy as to moralising. McGinn, that is to say, does not engage in a discussion of the principles that underlie moral judgments, or of the network of concepts which we use in making moral judgements. Rather what he aims to do is to arrive at particular moral judgements in six main areas of moral dispute (the treatment of animals, abortion, violence, sex, drugs and censorship). The position that emerges is a fairly orthodox form of late twentieth century Western liberalism: animals matter a good deal more than most people acknowledge; abortion, although permissible in early pregnancy, is an increasingly serious matter as the foetus develops, and can be justified only by weighty reasons in late pregnancy; violence is an evil that is necessary on occasion, but one should never be the first to resort to it; sexual practices and drug-taking should both be largely left to consenting individuals, though there is something morally suspect both about certain forms of sexual perversion and about drug addiction; censorship is a bad thing, and should be countenanced only in the most extreme situations.
  21. ^ a b Ron Rosenbaum (Nov. 30, 2009). "The Dangerous Mysteries of Consciousness: We still need answers". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2012-10-27. For some time, however, I have resigned myself to the so-called "Mysterian" position on this question offered by the Oxford-trained philosopher Colin McGinn, who argued in a illuminating book (melodramatically titled The Mysterious Flame) that we may never find an explanation of consciousness because (to oversimplify a bit) we are trapped within consciousness. One thing the book has going for it is its profound humility before the mystery it confronts. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  22. ^ Justine Jordan (book reviewer) (2 December 2000). "The thought gang: Justine Jordan on morbid meaning in A Clue to the Exit by Edward St Aubyn". The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ... guest appearance from philosopher of mind Colin McGinn leads Patrick to accept with a sigh of relief that the nature of consciousness can never be fully understood....
  23. ^ Gary Shapiro (November 28, 2005). "Conservative Debate About Iraq". The New York Sun. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Rutgers University professor Colin McGinn spoke last week with author and director Jonathan Miller at a program hosted by Columbia University's Heyman Center for the Humanities. Discussing atheism, Mr. Miller said his recent three-part BBC series on disbelief is unlikely to be aired in America: "PBS will simply not consider it."
  24. ^ a b LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS (June 26, 2009). "God and Science Don't Mix: A scientist can be a believer. But professionally, at least, he can't act like one". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2012-10-27. I ended up being one of two panelists labeled "atheists." The other was philosopher Colin McGinn. On the other side of the debate were two devoutly Catholic scientists, biologist Kenneth Miller and Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno. Mr. McGinn began by commenting that it was eminently rational to suppose that Santa Claus doesn't exist even if one cannot definitively prove that he doesn't. Likewise, he argued, we can apply the same logic to the supposed existence of God. The moderator of the session, Bill Blakemore, a reporter with some religious inclination, surprised me by bursting out in response, "Then I guess you are a rational atheist."
  25. ^ Chris Mooney (June 26th, 2009). "Lawrence Krauss on Science--Religion". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism. While such a leap may not be unimpeachable it is certainly rational, as Mr. McGinn pointed out at the World Science Festival. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  26. ^ a b c d CONNIE S. ROSATI (July 1, 1999). "ETHICS, EVIL, AND FICTION.(Review)". The Philosophical Review via Highbeam Research. Retrieved 2012-10-27. By COLIN MCGINN. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. v, 178. ...The methodology McGinn urges involves drawing upon literature for its deep and intricate portrayals of ethical themes. This would seem a natural approach given McGinn's substantive views about ethics. He contends that our ethical knowledge is aesthetically mediated (175); he speculates that the "innateness" of ethics may be "a by-product of our innate grasp of folk psychology" (56) which comes into play when we interpret literature; and he defends an "aesthetic theory of virtue" according to which virtue coincides with beauty of soul. ...
  27. ^ a b c d e Morrish, John (April 20, 2003). "Books: Sex, music and Bertrand Russell ; The Making of a Philosopher By Colin McGinn". The Independent via Highbeam Research. Retrieved 2012-10-27. But McGinn insists on demonstrating his obvious learning and intellectual rigour while revealing almost nothing of himself. ...
  28. ^ a b Steven Poole (11 April 2008). "Head on: Steven Poole on Mindfucking..." The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ...This nanobook is readable enough for the half hour it detains you, but in the end you might feel like asking: "What isn't mindfucking?"...
  29. ^ a b c Ron Rosenbaum (October 9, 2000). "The Mysterian Manifesto: Shakespeare, McGinn and Me.(Politics&Opinions)". The New York Observer via Highbeam Research. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ... British philosopher Colin McGinn in his brilliant and illuminating recent book...
  30. ^ a b c Christopher Tayler (7 August 2009). "The Movement Reconsidered, edited by Zachary Leader: Christopher Tayler enjoys a lively collection of essays revisiting the influence of a reluctant literary set". The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-10-27. The 1950s writers conventionally grouped as "the Movement" - Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie, John Wain and a few others - were famous for their studiously commonsensical bearing. "A neutral tone is nowadays preferred", Davie wrote in his poem "Remembering the Thirties", and the Movementeers liked to present themselves as being passionate only about moderation, zealous only in their distaste for displays of zeal. Although some of their energy came from social mobility - the typical Movement writer was Oxbridge-educated but not posh, and in revolt against patrician cultural pretensions - few of them resembled young men on the move. " .... More generally, Colin McGinn links the Movement with the ordinary language philosophy being done at the time;
  31. ^ Andrew Anthony (16 October 2010). "Oliver Sacks: The visionary who can't recognise faces". The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Although The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat gained almost universal rave reviews, an opposing voice was the philosopher Colin McGinn, who found it unreliable and sentimental. Sacks was so wounded by McGinn's review that he described it as a vivisection. Years later, having forgotten the author, he read a book of McGinn's and liked it so much he sent a fan letter. The two men met up and became friends. It was months before Sacks realised who his new friend was. Tellingly, although deeply hurt, he forgave McGinn.
  32. ^ McGinn, Colin (26 March 2002). The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy. ISBN 978-0-06-019792-6. I WAS BORN IN 1950, FIVE YEARS AFTER THE END OF WORLD WAR II, in West Hartlepool, county Durham, a small mining town in the northeast of England [2] {{cite book}}: External link in |quote= (help)
  33. ^ J. Madeleine Nash (Oct. 10, 1999). "Mystery Of Consciousness". Time Magazine. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ... to the outright pessimism of Rutgers University's Colin McGinn. He regards consciousness as "the ultimate mystery, a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel."... {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  34. ^ a b c Prusak, Bernard G. (May 19, 2000). "MIND MATTERS.(Review)". Commonweal via Highbeam Research. Retrieved 2012-10-27. The nineties were to consciousness what the sixties were to sex, according to philosopher Colin McGinn. If sex was on the brain then, more recently the hot topic has been "mind"--or, more precisely, how the brain gives rise to the mind. Written in a style lightened by wit and not burdened by jargon, The Mysterious Flame is a fascinating read from beginning to end. McGinn does what the best philosophy has always done: make us wonder at how strange the world is. McGinn's question is what sense we are to make of "the fact of consciousness," "the having of sensations, emotions, feelings, thoughts." He has written several technical treatments of this topic but here presents both the problems and his positions in a popular idiom.
  35. ^ William J. Cannon, Mordechai Feingold, Kathryn Steinhaus, Michael Szpir, William Thompson (September–October 1999). "Servants of Nature, The Mysterious Flame and more . . ". American Scientist. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Volume 87, Number 5 Page: 1; Philosopher Colin McGinn's The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (Basic Books, $24) explores the wildly improbable fact that meat can think. No, the author isn't contemplating the inner life of a clever pork chop, but rather the remarkably similar meat inside the human skull. How does brain meat do its thinking? The fact that we've been asking this question for so long suggests to McGinn that our meat has met one of its limits. Still, it's a pretty impressive limit for a piece of meat.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date format (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  36. ^ Christopher Perricone (2004). "Does the Philosophy of Art Have a Mind/Body Problem? Christopher Perricone says that the short answer is "Yes" and the long answer is this article". Philosophy Now. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Colin McGinn... the problem is: "the property of consciousness itself (or specific conscious states) is not an observable or perceptible property of the brain." ...
  37. ^ Andrew Brown (16 April 2004). "The semantic engineer". The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-10-27. The energy and wit of his attacks combines with breath-taking rudeness: discussing the philosopher Colin McGinn, he once wrote: "He draws his main inspiration from two philosophical sources, Thomas Nagel (formerly at Princeton, now at NYU) and Jerry Fodor, now his colleague at Rutgers. All three live in Manhattan and are no strangers to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Perhaps this helps to explain their shared pessimism, for it does appear that we are witnessing the birth of a new school of philosophy: New Jersey Nihilism." Fodor had been a friend, and Nagel a fellow student at Harvard.
  38. ^ Michael Shermer interviews Martin Gardner (1997). "Martin Gardner 1914–2010: Founder of the Modern Skeptical Movement". Skeptic Magazine. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Skeptic magazine Vol. 5, No. 2 (1997). The mysterians are not an organized group or anything. We don't hold meetings. Mysterians believe that at this point in our evolutionary history there are mysteries that cannot be resolved, like free will. Noam Chomsky, for example, is a mysterian. He is on record saying that we don't have the mental capacity to understand the nature of free will. John Searle is a mysterian. But the leading figure is a philosopher named Colin McGinn. He's written a whole book about this.
  39. ^ David Schneider, Christopher Brodie, Amos Esty (September–October 2004). "Out of Gas, Compass, Consciousness and more..." American Scientist. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Volume 92, Number 5 Page: 1 DOI: 10.1511/2004.49.1 How is it that mere matter can experience a sad thought, the color blue or the taste of a cheese–and–pepperoni pizza? Questions of this sort are central to the scientific explanation of consciousness, which author Susan Blackmore explores in Consciousness: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, $39.95, paper). Ostensibly written as a college text, Blackmore's book turns out to be a page–turner. It repeatedly evokes unsettling moments of reflection as the reader is introduced to ideas that bump up against the ceiling of human understanding. Indeed, as Blackmore explains, "mysterians" such as the British philosopher Colin McGinn argue that human beings are "cognitively closed" to the problem: We don't have the right kind of brain to solve it, just as a dog cannot comprehend a poem.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date format (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  40. ^ Robert R. Lavieri (September 19, 2007). "A review of The Trickster and the Paranormal". Skeptic Magazine. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ...Colin McGinn explains in The Mysterious Flame that he is thoroughly convinced we simply are not equipped to be able to answer the mind-body problem. Real science does recognize its own limits, and that is perhaps its most important task....
  41. ^ Robert Wright (June 24, 2001). "CAN MACHINES THINK?". Time Magazine. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Most people in the field now take the problem far more seriously," says Rutgers University philosopher Colin McGinn, author of The Problem of Consciousness. By acting as if consciousness is no great mystery, says McGinn, "Dennett's fighting a rearguard action.
  42. ^ Joel Achenbach (September 23, 2007). "GRAY MATTERS: What Makes Up My Mind?". Washington Post. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ... Consciousness ... But we don't understand it. We don't know how, in the words of philosopher Colin McGinn, "the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness."
  43. ^ Nicholas Humphrey (January 28, 2008). "To understand consciousness and its evolution, we need to ask the right questions". Seed Magazine. Retrieved 2012-10-27. How can the wine of consciousness, the weird, ineffable, immaterial qualia that give such richness to subjective experience, conceivably arise from the water of the brain? As the philosopher Colin McGinn has put it, it's like trying to explain how you can get "numbers from biscuits, or ethics from rhubarb."
  44. ^ Jon Turney (21 April 2004). "Telling it like it is: Explanations rarely hold very much water for scientists". The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Want to know if you understand something? Easy: explain it to someone else. But that simple test quickly shows us that there are things we may never understand. How would you explain the mechanism that generates the sensation of seeing red to one who is colour-blind? ... The example is a particular favourite of Colin McGinn, philosophy professor at Rutgers University. For instance, while he is satisfied that an objective, causal explanation of consciousness exists, it does not follow that we can understand it. And even if the explanation of what it is like to see red includes a complete account of neural networks, brain states, or anything else about the brain you like, it still won't explain the quality of the experience.
  45. ^ "Mysterianism lite". Nature.com. 2000. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Nature Neuroscience 3, 199 (2000) doi:10.1038/72893 ... The reason we find the mind−brain problem so baffling, the argument goes, is that humans did not evolve sufficient cognitive abilities to solve it, just as armadillos did not evolve the ability to understand arithmetic. This argument has been advocated by philosophers such as Colin McGinn and cognitive scientists such as Steven Pinker.
  46. ^ Brian Hayes (November–December 1999). "Experimental Lamarckism". American Scientist. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Volume 87, Number 6 Page: 494 DOI: 10.1511/1999.6.494 A few years ago Colin McGinn wrote (in a review of a book by Daniel Dennett): "Why have Lamarckian organisms never evolved? Surely a mutation which made the genes responsive to changes of phenotype ('learning') would have selectional advantage, and there seems to be no physical impossibility in such a set-up. Wouldn't natural selection favour a physiological mechanism that allowed learned characteristics to be passed genetically to offspring?"{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
  47. ^ John Horgan (September 22, 2006). "The Final Frontier: Ten years after the publication of The End of Science, John Horgan says the limits of scientific inquiry are more visible than ever". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2012-10-27. When I spoke to him more than 10 years ago, philosopher Colin McGinn, now at the University of Miami, rejected the view that all of science is provisional, saying, "Some of it is, but some of it isn't!" He also suggested that, given the constraints of human cognition, science will eventually reach its limits; at that point, he suggests, "religion might start to appeal to people again." Today, McGinn stands by his assertion that science "must in principle be completable" but adds, "I don't, however, think that people will or should turn to religion if science comes to an end." Current events might suggest otherwise.
  48. ^ Megan Talkington. "World Science Festival: "Science and Religion" Panelists Agree on Science, If Not Religion". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Colin McGinn dove right in, taking issue with the statement: "Atheism is a position of faith…as is religious belief," by deploying the analogy that no one would say it's irrational to deny the existence of Santa Claus.
  49. ^ Colin McGinn (28 November 2003). "The bookworm turned: Philosopher Colin McGinn cut his teeth on horror, science fiction and Doctor Dolittle". The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Writing books for a general audience is, of course, far more difficult than writing your average academic treatise on, say, philosophical logic. You can't expect your audience to know already what you are talking about, or to keep up with the latest academic developments; you have to get them from zero to 60 in a few brief paragraphs. The challenge is to cast difficult ideas in a form that is so limpidly stated, so direct and accessible, that it sets off small explosions of illumination in the reader's mind. I suppose, like many another writer, I want my own inner intensity to communicate itself to the mind of others; I want them to feel a glow of comprehension, of achieved insight. I want that inner bookworm to shine.
  50. ^ a b Remy Holzer (book reviewer) (December 15, 2005). "Philosophy for The Big Screen -- book review of 'The Power of Movies' by Colin McGinn". The New York Sun. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ... "Watching movies is like having sex, with the movie as the dominant partner." ...
  51. ^ a b Dennis Lythgoe (December 25, 2005). "'Power' depicts film experience". Deseret Morning News via Highbeam Research. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Colin McGinn ... argues that watching a movie causes us to "enter an altered state of consciousness."
  52. ^ Stuart Jeffries (20 December 2007). "Enemies of thought: A very public feud between two philosophers involving damning book reviews, professional roastings and personal slights shows how bitter, unforgiving - and unwittingly hilarious - academic spats can be". The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ... the feud is escalating into philosophy's equivalent of a prize fight between two former colleagues who are both among the showiest brawlers in the philosophy dojo. ...
  53. ^ Michael Specter (September 6, 1999). "The Dangerous Philosopher". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2012-10-27. ...Colin McGinn, who is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, asks, "What if you took every penny you ever had and gave it to the poor of Africa, as he would have us do? What we would have is no economy, no ability to generate new wealth or help anybody....
  54. ^ Greg Ross (interviewer) Steven Pinker (interviewee). "Scientists' Nightstand". American Scientist. Retrieved 2012-10-27. What book has influenced you most? ... and Colin McGinn's Problems in Philosophy (Blackwell, 1993), for suggesting that there may be conceptual puzzles that the human mind is biologically incapable of solving. {{cite news}}: |author= has generic name (help)



Teaching Company professors
Professor Subject University Notes
Jeremy Adams Philosophy SMU
Gregory S. Aldrete History U Wisconsin Green Bay
Emily Allen Literature Purdue
Robert J. Allison History Suffolk
Patrick N. Allitt History Emory
Francis J. Ambrosio Philosophy Georgetown
Roberta H. Anding Nutrition Baylor
Dorsey Armstrong History Purdue
Robert C. Bartlett Philosophy Boston College
Randall Bartlett Economics Smith
Kenneth R. Bartlett History U Toronto
Richard Baum History UCLA
Arthur T. Benjamin Mathematics Harvey Mudd
George R. Bent Fine arts Washington & Lee
Mark Berkson Religion Hamline
John M. Bowers Literature UNLV
David M. Bressoud Mathematics Macalester
Richard Brettell Fine arts U Texas-Dallas
Bob Brier History Long Island U
Robert Bucholz History Loyola
Edward B. Burger Mathematics Williams College
Lawrence Cahoone Philosophy Coll. of the Holy Cross
Frank Cardulla Chemistry Niles North High School
Sean Carroll Science Cal Tech
Phillip Cary Philosophy Eastern University
Alexis Q. Castor History Franklin & Marshall
Shai Cherry Religion UCLA
Thomas Childers History U Penn
David Christian History Macquarie U
Francis B. Colavita Science U Pittsburgh
Peter Conn History U Penn
William R. Cook History SUNY Geneseo
Frank B. Cross Business U Texas Austin
Philip Daileader History Coll. William & Mary
Dennis Dalton Philosophy Columbia
Leo Damrosch Literature Harvard
Satyan L. Devadoss Science Williams Coll.
Robert L. Devaney Mathematics Boston U
Robert L. Dise Jr. History U Northern Iowa
Michael Dues Business U Arizona
William Dunham Mathematics Muhlenberg
Marshall C. Eakin History Vanderbilt
Malcolm David Eckel Religion Boston U
Bruce H. Edwards Mathematics U Florida
Bart D. Ehrman History UNC Chapel Hill
Stephen A. Erickson Philosophy Pomona
John L. Esposito Religion Georgetown
Brian M. Fagan Archaeology UC Santa Barbara
Garrett G. Fagan History Penn State
J. Rufus Fears History U Oklahoma
Alex Filippenko Astronomy UC Berkeley
John E. Finn History Wesleyan
Edward Fischer Science Vanderbilt
Andrew C. Fix History Lafayette
Bruce E. Fleury Science Tulane
Robert G. Fovell Meterology UCLA
Connel Fullenkamp Business Duke
Isaiah M. Gafni Religion Hebrew U Jerusalem
Gary W. Gallagher History U Virginia
Jay L. Garfield Philosophy Smith Coll.
Robert Garland History Colgate
S. James Gates Jr. Science U Maryland Coll Park
Michael Geisen Studying Crook County Middle School National Tchr
of Year
Steven L. Goldman Philosophy Lehigh
Anthony A. Goodman Medicine Montana State
Judith V. Grabiner Philosophy Pitzer
Robert Greenberg Music San Francisco Performances
Brad S. Gregory History Notre Dame
Frederick Gregory History U Florida
Patrick Grim Philosophy SUNY Stony Brook
Jeffrey C. Grossman Science MIT
Allen C. Guelzo History Gettysburg
John R. Hale Archaeology U Louisville
James Hall Religion U Richmond
Gary Hamburg History Claremont McKenna
Kenneth J. Hammond History New Mexico St U
Grant Hardy Philosophy UNC Asheville
Kenneth W. Harl History Tulane
John Hawks Science U Wisconsin Madison
Robert M. Hazen Science George Mason U
James A. W. Heffernan Literature Dartmouth
Susan Sage Heinzelman Literature U Texas Austin
David J. Helfand Science Columbia
Ronald B. Herzman History SUNY - Geneseo
Kathleen M. Higgins Philosophy U Texas Austin
Stephen P. Hinshaw Science UC Berkeley
Sharon Latchaw Hirsh Fine arts Rosemont College
Dale Hoak History Coll. William & Mary
Dean Hodgkin Health
Don Howard Philosophy Notre Dame
Peter Irons Law UC San Diego
Luke Timothy Johnson Philosophy Emory
Charles B. Jones Religion Catholic U
Steve Joordens Health U Toronto Scarborough
Robert H. Kane Philosophy U Texas Austin
Jeffrey L. Kasser Philosophy Colorado State U
Dalton Kehoe Communication York U
Shana Kelley Science U Toronto
Douglas Kellner Philosophy UCLA
Charles Kimball Religion U Oklahoma
Barbara J. King Anthropology Coll. William & Mary
Clare R. Kinney Literature U Virginia
William Kloss Art history Smithsonian
Joseph F. Kobylka History SMU
Craig R. Koester Religion Luther Seminary
Alan Charles Kors Philosophy U Penn
Father Joseph Koterski, S.J. Religion Fordham
Lloyd Kramer Philosophy UNC Chapel Hill
Michael Krasny Literature San Francisco State U
Brooks Landon Literature U Iowa
Edward J. Larson Science Pepperdine
Paul Gordon Lauren History U Montana
Mark Leary Science Duke
John W. I. Lee History UC Santa Barbara
Seth Lerer History UC San Diego
Amy-Jill Levine Religion Vanderbilt
Allan J. Lichtman History American U
Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius History U Tennessee
Scott MacEachern Science Bowdoin
Jodi Magness Religion UNC Chapel Hill
Peter C. Mancall History USC
Louis Markos Literature Houston Baptist U
Anthony Martin Science Emory
David W. Martin Psychology NC State
Charles Mathewes Religion U Virginia
Tilar J. Mazzeo Language Colby
Jeremy McInerney History U Penn
John McWhorter Linguistics Columbia
Bill Messenger Music The Peabody Institute
David M. Meyer Science Northwestern
Mark W. Muesse Religion Rhodes College
Jerry Z. Muller Business Catholic U
Edward M. Murphy Astronomy U Virginia
Elizabeth A. Murray Science Coll. of Mt. St. Joseph
Ashton Nichols Language Dickinson
Shaun Nichols Philosophy U Arizona
Thomas F. X. Noble Religion Notre Dame
James Noggle Mathematics Pendleton Heights
High School
Jeanette Norden Neuroscience Vanderbilt
Steven Novella Medicine Yale Medical School
Stephen Nowicki Biology Duke
Sherwin B. Nuland History Yale Medical School
Joseph S. Nye Jr. History Harvard
Edward T. O'Donnell History Coll. Holy Cross
Robert Oden Religion Carleton College
Scott E. Page Business U Michigan
Thomas L. Pangle History U Texas Austin
Monisha Pasupathi Psychology U Utah
Jennifer Paxton History Georgetown
Jeffrey Perl Literature Bar-Ilan U
Steven Pollock Physics U Colorado Boulder
Lawrence M. Principe History Johns Hopkins
Eric S. Rabkin Literature U Michigan
Pamela Radcliff History UC San Diego
Stephen Railton Literature U Virginia
Gary A. Rendsburg History Rutgers
John J. Renton Geology West Virginia U
Stephen Ressler Science US Military West Point
Richard Restak Health G. Washington Note: medical school
Stanley K. Ridgley Business Drexel U
Mark Risjord Philosophy Emory
Michael A. Roberto Business Bryant U
Tyler Roberts Philosophy Grinnell
Daniel N. Robinson History Georgetown
Peter Rodriguez Business U Virginia business school
David Roochnik Philosophy Boston U
Jonathan P. Roth History San José State U
David B. Ruderman History U Penn
Teofilo F. Ruiz History UCLA
Donald G. Saari Science UC Irvine
Peter Saccio Literature Dartmouth
David Sadava Genetics Claremont-McKenna
Michael K. Salemi Business UNC Chapel Hill
Robert Sapolsky Neuroscience Stanford
Ted Sargent Science U Toronto
Catherine B. Scallen Fine arts Case Western Reserve
David J. Schenker Literature U Missouri-Columbia
Benjamin Schumacher Physics Kenyon
James A. Sellers Mathematics Penn State
Jeremy Shearmur Philosophy Australian National U
Lee M. Silver Genetics Princeton
Jennifer Simonetti-Bryan Health Note: wine expert
Gary A. Sojka Science Bucknell
Robert C. Solomon Philosophy U Texas Austin
Ori Z. Soltes Fine arts Georgetown
Willard Spiegelman Literature SMU
Timothy Spurgin Literature Lawrence U
Darren Staloff Philosophy City College of NY
Michael Starbird Mathematics U Texas Austin
Peter N. Stearns History George Mason U
Jonathan Steinberg History U Penn
Mark Steinberg History U Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Scott P. Stevens Mathematics James Madison U
Mark A. Stoler History U Vermont
Eric G. Strauss Science Loyola Marymount U
Steven Strogatz Science Cornell
Michael Sugrue Philosophy Ave Maria U
Frank Summers Astronomy Space Telescope Science Inst.
John Sutherland Literature Cal Tech
Timothy Taylor Economics Macalester
Linwood Thompson History Bellflower High School Note: in Los Angeles
David Thorburn Literature MIT
Harold J. Tobin Oceanography U Wisconsin Madison
Steven L. Tuck History Miami University
Neil deGrasse Tyson Astronomy Hayden Planetarium
Elizabeth Vandiver History Whitman College
Kenneth P. Vickery History NC State
Peter M. Vishton Psychology Coll. William & Mary
Grant L. Voth Literature Monterey Peninsula
William E. Wallace Fine arts Washington U St. Louis
Sam Wang Neuroscience Princeton
Malcolm W. Watson Biology Brandeis
Irwin Weil Literature Northwestern
Robert I. Weiner History Lafayette
Arnold Weinstein Literature Brown
Robert Whaples Business Wake Forest
Bonnie Wheeler History SMU
Mark Whittle Astronomy U Virginia
Thomas Williams Philosophy U South Florida
Richard Wolfson Science Middlebury
Paul Root Wolpe Psychology Emory
Ian Worthington History U Missouri-Columbia
Michael E. Wysession Geology Wash. U-St. Louis
Salim Yaqub History UC Santa Barbara
David Zarefsky History Northwestern
Paul Zeitz Mathematics U San Francisco
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Tomwsulcer/United_States_Congress&oldid=1092382810"