|
Terug
Colin McGinn:
Colin McGinn (born 1950) is a British philosopher at Rutgers University, soon to be transferring to the University of Miami, because he wants to surf year-round (or so he told The Chronicle of Higher Education). Professor McGinn was educated at Oxford University. He has written on philosophy and philosophers in many publications. His most famous work is The Mysterious  Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (2000). He is primarily known for promoting the view known as New Mysterianism, which is a view in philosophy of mind that states that the human mind is fundamentally incapable of comprehending itself entirely. This is his explanation as to why we humans have had such difficulty understanding our own consciousness. McGinn's answer to the hard problem of consciousness is that humans are ultimately unable to find the answer.
Colin McGinn is also a novelist as well as the author of a popular cursory introduction to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Since May, 2004, he has received some degree of fame for "Eternal Questions, Timeless Approaches", an audiobook providing a brief overview of philosophy, which was released on Barnes and Noble's flagship "Portable Professor" series of audio lectures.
Consciousness can reduce even the most fastidious thinker to blabbering incoherence.
-- Colin McGinn - New York Review of Books 27 June 2002
So there is a sense in which ethical knowledge is more solidly founded in our natural constitution than knowledge of science: we acquire it with less effort of will and mental labour, as we acquire language.
-- Colin McGinn - Ethics Evil and Fiction
Suppose you take as a moral principle, it's wrong to steal. People say, "Why is it wrong to steal?". Answer - because God says it's wrong to steal. God commanded that you should not steal. OK? The point that Socrates makes in that dialogue is to say, "How can God give this moral rule a foundation? Either the moral rule is intrinsically a sound moral rule, or it can't be given soundness and legitimacy from an external command.". Suppose we had the rule "It's right to murder.". Somebody said, "That's not right! Murder is wrong!". And somebody said in reply, "But God says it's right to murder.". That doesn't convince you that it's right to murder. If God says that something is right which isn't right, God's wrong. He can't make something right just by saying it's right. God can only... what God has to do is reflect what's right in his commandments so that's what he really does. It is wrong to steal. It's wrong to steal and wrong to murder. So God says that it's wrong and he's right to say that. Why? Because it IS wrong in the two cases! He doesn't make it wrong by saying it. He can't do that. It that were so, we'd have no reason to respect God's morality....
-- Colin McGinn - The Atheism Tapes
Naar boven
|
