Colin McGinn’s most influential argument begins with a disconcerting possibility: consciousness may be entirely natural, and yet human beings may never be able to explain how it arises from the brain. The difficulty, he suggested, might not be a temporary gap in science or philosophy. It might reflect a limit in the kind of minds doing the explaining. This position, known as new mysterianism, does not invoke anything supernatural. Instead, it asks whether the human intellect is equipped to solve every problem it can recognise.
That challenge grew out of an academic career which began in psychology and took McGinn from Manchester and Oxford to University College London, Rutgers and the University of Miami. His work ranged well beyond consciousness, into language, metaphysics, ethics, animal rights and literature. A public controversy at the end of his Miami career is also part of the record. Together, these threads make for a more complex account than the familiar image of a philosopher attached to a single provocative thesis.
A route through education
McGinn was born in West Hartlepool, County Durham, on 10 March 1950. His family had mining connections: both grandfathers were miners, and his father, Joseph, left school to work as a miner before educating himself at night school and becoming a building manager. When McGinn was three, the family moved to Gillingham, Kent; when he was eleven, they moved again, to Blackpool in Lancashire.
His school career did not follow a smooth or inevitable path. After failing the 11-plus, he attended a technical school in Kent and a secondary modern school in Blackpool. Strong O-level results allowed him to transfer to the local grammar school for A-levels. This background is one part of the story of a philosopher whose career later crossed several prominent institutions, though it should not be turned into a simple explanation of his writing or ideas.
In 1968, McGinn began studying psychology at the University of Manchester. He graduated with first-class honours in 1971 and completed an MA in psychology in 1972. That training preceded, rather than followed, his move into academic philosophy. It placed the study of the mind within his education from the outset, while his later work brought questions about experience and thought into philosophical debates about explanation, meaning and knowledge.
In 1972 he entered Jesus College, Oxford. Initially admitted for a Bachelor of Letters course, he switched to the BPhil after the recommendation of his adviser, Michael R. Ayers. McGinn won Oxford’s John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy in 1973, and received his BPhil in 1974. His thesis concerned the semantics of Donald Davidson and was supervised by Ayers and P. F. Strawson. That account corrects the imported article’s attribution of his supervision to Michael Dummett.
From London to Oxford and Rutgers
McGinn taught at University College London for eleven years, first as a lecturer in philosophy from 1974 to 1984 and then as a reader from 1984 to 1985. In 1985, he succeeded Gareth Evans as Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at the University of Oxford, a post he held until 1990. The sequence placed him in British university philosophy as both a teacher and a holder of a senior Oxford readership before the next major move in his career.
His academic work also took him to visiting positions at universities in the United States and Europe. These included the University of California, Los Angeles, Bielefeld University, the University of Southern California, Rutgers, the University of Helsinki, City University of New York and Princeton. The appointments span the years 1979 to 1992 and show the international reach of his academic career without obscuring its British foundations.
In 1990, McGinn joined Rutgers University as a full professor. He remained there until moving to the University of Miami in 2006, where he became Professor of Philosophy and Cooper Fellow. His teaching career thus linked Manchester, Oxford and UCL with two American universities. The movement across institutions matters to the story of his influence: his work in the philosophy of mind was developed within an international academic field, even as his education and early senior posts were rooted in Britain.
What new mysterianism claims
McGinn’s best-known philosophical position is new mysterianism, also described in connection with cognitive closure. He developed the argument in the 1989 paper “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” and in The Problem of Consciousness, published in 1991. The central proposal is that the human mind might be unable to discover the causal basis of conscious experience: how the felt qualities of experience arise from the physical brain.
“Cognitive closure” is McGinn’s term for a limit on what a particular kind of mind can understand. A property or theory might be inaccessible to one sort of mind, while accessible to another with different conceptual capacities. The limit, on this account, does not show that the inaccessible property is unreal. It shows only that a mind may lack the means to grasp it. McGinn applied that thought to consciousness: people can experience consciousness and form the concept of it, while remaining unable to understand the mechanism by which the brain gives rise to experience.
This is not the claim that consciousness is inherently supernatural or that science should stop investigating the brain. New mysterianism differs from an older, ontological use of “mystery”, which treats consciousness as mysterious in itself. McGinn’s proposal is epistemological: the world may be natural, while the explanation remains beyond human understanding. His argument turns the pressure back on the questioner. If an account of consciousness seems persistently out of reach, perhaps the obstacle is not simply a lack of effort or data; perhaps the minds seeking the account have limitations of their own.
The claim is deliberately challenging. It does not provide a conventional solution to the mind–body problem, but asks whether a solution is available to human beings at all. That distinction makes the argument more than a declaration that consciousness is difficult. It directs attention to the capacities and blind spots of the people attempting to explain it, and to the possibility that a real fact can nevertheless evade a particular form of understanding.
McGinn returned to consciousness in Consciousness and Its Objects (2004), a later work extending his treatment of the subject. He also introduced the argument in the more accessible The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (1999). Together with the 1989 paper and the 1991 book, these works made the question of cognitive limits a continuing part of his philosophical career. The position has prompted debate precisely because it asks philosophers and scientists to consider whether the problem might be unsolvable for us, rather than merely unsolved so far.
A wider field of interests
McGinn’s writing began addressing questions beyond consciousness before that issue became central to his reputation. The Character of Mind (1982) introduced questions in the philosophy of mind; The Subjective View (1983) and Wittgenstein on Meaning (1984) explored other aspects of thought and language. Mental Content (1989) continued that inquiry. The early books show a philosopher concerned with how thought represents the world and how meaning, experience and mind relate.
Later work continued across logic, metaphysics and language. Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry (1993) widened questions about the reach of human understanding beyond consciousness. Knowledge and Reality (1999) collected work on the relationship between mind and world; Truth by Analysis and Basic Structures of Reality, both published in 2011, pursued questions in logic and metaphysics. The subjects and titles differ, but the underlying concern with what can be known and explained recurs.
His interests also extended to ethics and animal rights. McGinn argued that human beings should take seriously the lives of animals as lives that matter in their own right, rather than viewing them only through human purposes. His books included The Meaning of Disgust (2011), Shakespeare’s Philosophy (2006), The Power of Movies (2005) and Sport: A Philosopher’s Manual (2008). The range suggests a view of philosophy as a way of examining cultural and everyday subjects as well as specialist problems in the theory of mind.
McGinn also wrote fiction, publishing the novels The Space Trap (1992) and Bad Patches (2012). His work for readers beyond academic philosophy included regular contributions of reviews and short stories to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, along with occasional writing for publications including Nature, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Times and The Times Literary Supplement.
Radio and television formed another part of that public-facing work. In 1984 he discussed John Searle’s Reith lectures on BBC Radio Three with Searle, Richard Gregory and Colin Blakemore. The following year he took part in a radio debate on animal rights with Andrew Huxley, moderated by Bernard Williams. He was interviewed for Jonathan Miller’s television documentary series Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, later broadcast as The Atheism Tapes, and appeared in episodes of Closer to Truth discussing consciousness, personal identity, free will and materialism.
A contested final chapter in Miami
McGinn resigned from his position at the University of Miami in 2013 after a graduate student accused him of sexual harassment. He denied wrongdoing. The student later brought a lawsuit against the university, McGinn and another philosophy professor; the lawsuit was settled in October 2016. The terms were not disclosed. The complaint and its aftermath contributed to wider debate about harassment and sexism in academic philosophy, including the responsibilities of universities and the effects of complaints on students and staff.
That episode needs to be acknowledged without treating an accusation as a finding of guilt or allowing it to substitute for an account of McGinn’s work. The supplied record establishes his resignation, the accusation, his denial and the later settlement; it does not establish the settlement’s terms. His philosophical writing and the controversy belong in the same account, but they are different kinds of information and should not be conflated.
Why Colin McGinn deserves a place in British Legacy
Colin McGinn deserves a place in British Legacy because his career brings a distinct British educational and philosophical story into an international debate. Born in West Hartlepool and educated in Kent and Lancashire, he went from studying psychology at Manchester to philosophical research at Oxford, then taught at UCL and held the Wilde Readership in Mental Philosophy. Those concrete links are more telling than a general claim about national character: they trace how his British education and academic posts formed part of the career of a philosopher whose work was later developed and discussed across institutions in the United States as well.
His particular contribution was to make the limits of explanation themselves a serious subject. In his account of cognitive closure, the possibility that consciousness cannot be explained by human minds is not an invitation to superstition or a denial of nature. It is a challenge to ask whether the limits of inquiry might belong partly to the inquirer. That proposal has lasting value as a philosophical test, even for readers who reject its conclusion: it forces debate to distinguish what is not yet understood from what may be inaccessible to us. His books on the mind, language, metaphysics and ethics, alongside work on animals, Shakespeare, film and sport, also show a career that carried philosophical questioning into varied subjects. British Legacy can remember him both for a sharply defined contribution to the philosophy of consciousness and for a body of work that asked how far explanation, judgement and understanding can reach.
Sources
Colin McGinn — Wikipedia revision
Adapted in part from Colin McGinn by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.