Conversation with the Author Colin McGinn.docVIP

Conversation with an Author: Colin McGinn University of Miami Ed.: Can you tell us a bit about your writing process? Professor Colin McGinn, author of “Why I am an Atheist,” which will be published in an upcoming issue of Theoretical Applied Ethics took some time off from writing to talk to us a bit about atheism, his current projects, and his writing process. The conversation went as follows: CM: Sure, I have a very systematic writing process. I often describe it to graduate students, I’ll share it with you the way I do with them. I always produce my writing in stages. I think about it for a while first, I read up on all of the literature and just write out notes by hand. I do this until I run out of ideas on the topic. I don’t try to write any finished prose until I don’t have any more ideas in mind. Now this can take quite a while. Usually I have about twenty pages of notes with writing on both sides. Managing Editor: Professor McGinn, can you tell us a bit about the projects that you’re currently working on? Colin McGinn: I’m doing something very interesting. I’m on a sabbatical year and am actually writing three books on very different topics. Next, I go over the notes that I have and try to pick out the main themes, things that could be chapters or sections of a paper, but at that point I don’t put them into any particular order or framework. Once I have these main points, the whole thing seems to come together pretty easily, because, by this point, I’ve thought about it a lot. Ed.: What are the books on? CM: The first book, “The Meaning of Disgust: Life, Death, and Revulsion,” will be published by Oxford University Press. The second, on the philosophy of physics, is called “Basic Structures of Reality: Essays in Meta-Physics.” And the third book is called “Truth by Analysis: Games, Names, and Philosophy.” That book is on Metaphilosophy and why concept analysis is important. After organizing my notes this way, I write out a plan by hand.