Colin McGinn has held teaching posts and professorships at University College London, the University of Oxford, Rutgers University, and the University of Miami.
17 Facts About Colin McGinn
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Colin McGinn has written over 20 books on this and other areas of philosophy, including The Character of Mind, The Problem of Consciousness, Consciousness and Its Objects, and The Meaning of Disgust.
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Colin McGinn was born in West Hartlepool, a town in County Durham, England.
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In 1968, Colin McGinn began a degree in psychology at the University of Manchester, obtaining a first-class honours degree in 1971 and an MA in 1972, in psychology.
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Colin McGinn switched to the Bachelor of Philosophy postgraduate programme on the recommendation of his advisor, Michael R Ayers.
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Colin McGinn received his BPhil in 1974, writing a thesis under the supervision of Ayers and P F Strawson on the semantics of Donald Davidson.
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Colin McGinn taught at University College London for 11 years, first as a lecturer in philosophy, then as reader.
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Colin McGinn held visiting professorships at the University of California, Los Angeles, University of Bielefeld, University of Southern California, Rutgers University, University of Helsinki, City University of New York and Princeton University.
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Colin McGinn filed a lawsuit in October 2015 against the university, McGinn, and Edward Erwin, another philosophy professor at the University of Miami.
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In 2014, East Carolina University offered Colin McGinn a visiting professorship but university administrators later rescinded the offer.
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Colin McGinn has written extensively on philosophical logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of language, but is best known for his work in philosophy of mind.
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Colin McGinn 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.
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Colin McGinn argued in the paper for the idea of cognitive closure:.
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Colin McGinn has regularly contributed reviews and short stories to the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and has written occasionally for Nature, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Times and The Times Literary Supplement.
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Colin McGinn has written two novels, The Space Trap and Bad Patches.
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Colin McGinn was interviewed for Jonathan Miller's 2003 documentary miniseries Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, later broadcast as The Atheism Tapes, and published an article titled "Why I am an Atheist".
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Colin McGinn has appeared in 11 episodes of Closer to Truth hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, discussing consciousness, personal identity, free will, and materialism.