Mental Content

Aimed at philsophy graduates this book investigates mental content in a systematic way and advances a number of claims about how mental content states are related to the body and the world. Internalism is the thesis that they are; externalism is the theory that they are not.

Colin McGinn was educated at Oxford University. The author of sixteen previous books, including The Making of a Philosopher, he has written for the London Review of Books, The New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, and other publications. He has taught philosophy at University College of London, Oxford, and Rutgers University, and is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Miami.

Mental Content systematically investigates the relationship between the nature of mental states and the world in which these states exist. It examines the opposing theses of internalism and externalism: internalism takes the contents of the mind to be essentially independent of the surrounding world, while externalism supposes there to be a deep connection between states of mind and conditions in the nonmental world. Is the mind fundamentally autonomous with respect to the world, or does the world enter into the very nature of the mind? A qualified externalism is defended. Mental Content proposes significant advances in the disputes about mind and brain, personhood, perception, scepticism, folk psychology and the mechanism of mental representation.

Mental Content systematically investigates the relationship between the nature of mental states and the world in which these states exist. It examines the opposing theses of internalism and externalism: internalism takes the contents of the mind to be essentially independent of the surrounding world, while externalism supposes there to be a deep connection between states of mind and conditions in the nonmental world. Is the mind fundamentally autonomous with respect to the world, or does the world enter into the very nature of the mind? A qualified externalism is defended. Mental Content proposes significant advances in the disputes about mind and brain, personhood, perception, scepticism, folk psychology and the mechanism of mental representation.

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