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“... Suppose I perform an action certified by morality as good – say, giving money to charity. I then do something good because it is good. We might say that this action had the moral property goodness and that in acknowledging this to be so I had a reason to perform it. Anyone else has an equal reason to perform the same action, which is good no matter who performs it ...”

“... of philosophy to have special wisdom qualifications, would think it presumptuous to write them. Colin McGinn does concede that specialist skills in philosophy don’t in themselves constitute a licence to preach or judge (‘morality isn’t the kind of thing in which you can have a special expertise’), but he seems confident all the same that a ...”

“... in the head but are ‘international’, than need find the argument absolutely compelling. Colin McGinn is one philosopher who does wholeheartedly accept the argument for water. He begins the book with it, and Earth’s twin planet is never far away. But he is more cautious or perhaps just more detailed than Putnam in seeing how far the argument ...”

“... 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 period of more than a decade, and drawn together from the usual motley of largely inaccessible academic journals, these essays provide a vivid introduction to current views in the philosophy of mind and to their immediate precursors ...”

“... nobody agrees with – either as views of Wittgenstein’s or as truths about meaning. Colin McGinn attacks Kripke on both counts. His Wittgenstein on Meaning is a response to Kripke’s brilliant Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982). McGinn confesses he always found ...”

“... occupied between 1930 and 1960 – also, it may be, under the influence of Wittgenstein!). Colin McGinn’s admirable book manages to give a comprehensive picture of the state of play in the subject at the present time. In a compressed and well-written work, and without any loss of subtlety, he contrives to lead the reader on a guided tour of the ...”

“... aims to be explicit about these equations when experience is not on the list. In his lucid paper, Colin McGinn also urges that experience be considered explicitly in an interpretation procedure. But I doubt that it is possible to incorporate it in the way McGinn envisages. McGinn’s ...”

“... forget that it is a metaphor, and take the claim literally, so that the mind/brain is a computer. Colin McGinn calls this view ‘pan-computationalism’. In its most extreme version the universe becomes a computer, whose parts run their own particular programs or sub-routines. Penrose defines computation as the action of a Turing machine, a perfectly ...”

“... of the author on the jacket of the book; I cannot end with a more fitting tribute than the one Colin McGinn paid to Quine in the Journal of Philosophy (also quoted on the jacket of the book): ‘Quine pursues philosophical vision with an uncompromising consistency of purpose that makes his doctrines impossible to ignore. You either go ...”

“... biology’s stock-in-trade. Indeed, any resemblance this text bears to what readers of Searle, Colin McGinn or Dennett might expect to find in a book about consciousness is almost entirely coincidental, with the exception of a short postscript in which – I hope tongue-in-cheek – Crick solves the problem of Free Will by locating it in the anterior ...”

“... Raine, James Fenton, Alan Jenkins, Clive Wilmer), the academics (Nicholas Jenkins, Terry Castle, Colin McGinn, Deborah Cameron, Deborah Bowman, William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists (Karl Miller, Anthony Thwaite, Robert Conquest), though several of them can lay claim to more than one of these ...”

“... of the term in question. In emphasising the importance of standard objects, Pears agrees with Colin McGinn. The possibility that this basis for correction might be sufficient for the existence of a rule suggests that a language which was private in the sense that it was invented and used entirely by a solitary being would not be logically ...”

“... incarnate self-evident truths. As regular readers of these pages know, philosophers like Colin McGinn, Thomas Nagel and John Searle have no use for Dennett. All of them would agree that he has failed to respect ‘the brute facts of immediate conscious experience’. All of them would sympathise with Roger Penrose’s conviction, as put forward ...”