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Colin McGinn

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Sanitation (philosophy of)Today

I've just finished reading Rose George's The Big Necessity, about toilets and human waste (euphemism alert!)--as part of my interest in the emotion of disgust. I'd strongly recommend Aurel Kolnai's monograph "On Disgust" as a philosophical treatment of the subject; it contains some excellent phenomenological work with some important conceptual distinctions (far better than most of what passes for work on the emotions in current analytical philosophy). But Ms. George brings out the medical/cultural/political aspects of the problem of our disgusting bodies--what to do with and about all the shit we produce. The effects on health of inadequate toilets in the "turd world" (Naipaul) are catastrophic, but the sheer unpleasantness of living near human excrement is also appalling. Yet most people don't want to have to think about it, because of the distastefulness of the topic: no celebrity wants to hitch herself to the shit bandwagon. Our general repression of matters disgusting prevents us facing up to a serious health problem. If we are the "god that shits" (E. Becker), then we are in full flight from ourselves. I even wonder whether religion itself and the whole idea of a god is produced by our self-disgust. 

DeathDecember 6 2008

Why is death bad? Not for the same reason life is--that it contains bad experiences; it contains no experiences. The badness of death consists in the removal of all intentionality, not its suffusion by bad intentional objects. This has the implication that a consciousness without intentionality, as may be supposed for the early fetus, has no value. It isn't sentience as such that confers value but sentience combined with (determinate) intentionality. A kind of super-Alzheimer's that subtracted all intentionality from the subject would be tantamount to death, so far as value in concerned. On reflection, that sounds right.

ExamDecember 6 2008

"Philosophy is difficult and the difficult thing is to make it look easy; fiction is easy and the easy thing is to make it look difficult (the difficult thing is to make it interesting without making it difficult)." Discuss.

Black and WhiteNovember 1 2008

Is anyone else as irritated as I am by the constant description of Barack Obama as "black"? He has a white mother and a black father, which by my calculations makes him half white and half black. So it's just as true to describe him a white man as a black man. I can't help sensing a racist presupposition: just to be a bit black is already to be demoted, as if white purity has been somehow tainted. Of course, it's a good thing that a partially black man can be within a hair of achieving the White House, and it's worth pointing this out in descriptions of him; but in a post-racist society it would be misleading to describe him simply as "black". I really don't see him as one or the other, just as a combination--preciselly as white as he is black. So let's look forward to the next president of the USA as a "blite" man or a "whack" man.

Don’t be ReligulousOctober 20 2008

I went to see Bill Maher’s documentary last night, on a balmy Miami night. Afterwards the rains came down in Biblical proportions, thus announcing God’s displeasure at the film and my attendance (I thwarted His wrath under a convenient restaurant umbrella). It’s an enjoyable and instructive film, especially if you enjoy groaning at people’s amazing credulity and nastiness, not the mention the silly outfits. What the film conveys better than any book is the sheer nuttiness of it all: the weird fantastical beliefs, the mental contortions, the verbal slipperiness, the flickering wild eyes. Each religion seems determined to outdo the others for sheer bizarreness—the less credible the better. The Mormon religion took the grand prize for me, with God relaxing on his nearby planet and Missouri the site of the Second Coming. But there was plenty to root for in the realms of the Higher Charlatanry, e.g. the portly Hispanic guy who fancies he is Jesus Christ (and thousands agree with him). My question afterwards was who was the most repulsive of the religious fanatics on display: Christians, Moslems and orthodox Jews had their strong contenders. This was equal-opportunity religion-bashing; except that Maher didn’t do much bashing, leaving that to the proponents of the various sects themselves. What a gallery of pious rogues! A book almost inevitably takes its subject seriously, but a film like this can simply let the camera record the gaudy tapestry of human delusion and