Theo Todman's Book Collection (Book-Paper Abstracts)

McGinn’s Preface (Full Text)

1. The chapters herein assembled represent the course of my thinking about the mind-body problem over a number of years – more than ten, I discover to my surprise. They fall into two groups. The first four chapters were written over the last two or three years, and contain ideas that had not occurred to me before that time. The first two of these have already been printed elsewhere, while the (much longer) second two appear here for the first time. They are presented in the order in which they were written, the later ones not having been planned at the time the earlier ones came into existence. Inevitably, there is some repetition in this material: but I hope clarity and cogency will be aided thereby — the basic ideas revealing themselves afresh from a variety of angles. The second group, consisting of the remaining four chapters, date from an earlier period, when I was thinking along somewhat different lines. I include them here because friends have suggested that it would be useful to bring them more accessibly together, and because they serve to throw the newer chapters into sharper relief. I am grateful to the relevant publishers for permissions to reprint.
2. The new perspective on the problem of consciousness that I advocate in what follows struck me with some force when it first occurred to me. (I even went so far as to get out of bed in the dead of night to write down some notes!) It had the welcome effect of dissolving the nagging intellectual discomfort that I had long associated with the problem. For the first time I felt able to relax in the face of the mind-body problem – as if an incessant torment had been finally laid to rest. In composing the chapters, I have tried, philanthropically, to induce the same sense of relief in my audience: I want the reader first to feel the problem aching in his or her bones, and then (to switch metaphors) watch it lift like an oppressive mist at dawn. (No doubt I have failed in this aspiration.) But I am also anxious to bring out the full repercussions, disturbing as they are, of the view I am proposing: first comes the bad news; then the good news; but then more bad news to follow. The upshot is a kind of dystopian utopia, intellectually speaking.
3. I have also made an effort to write in a way that will be accessible to interested parties outside the narrow ranks of professional philosophers (particularly in chapters 3 and 4). The problem of consciousness concerns not just philosophers but scientists, artists, and even regular folk: it is the question of what it is to be a conscious organism. You do not need special philosophical training to feel the pull of the problem, and I would like to think that what I have written might administer relief to members of all three cultures, not only the professionally philosophical.
4. In addition to those thanked in individual chapters, I should like to express my gratitude particularly to the following people for their comments and encouragement: Malcolm Budd, Stephan Chambers, Consuelo Preti, Galen Strawson. I owe a special debt to Thomas Nagel, whose work on the mind-body problem pointed me in the direction I ended up pursuing. I doubt if I would have arrived at the present view had I not first been steeped in his ideas (which is not to say that he agrees with me).