Can consciousness be fitted into a naturalistic worldview or is it inherently mysterious? In virtue of what does a physical organism come to have an inner conscious life? This book argues that we are not equipped to understand the workings of conciousness, despite its objective naturalness. Introspection does not reveal the hiddent structure of consciousness and it is this that joins experience to the material world.

Colin McGinn was formerly Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy, Oxford University. He is the author of The Character of Mind (1981), The Subjective View (1982), Wittgenstein on Meaning (Blackwell, 1984) and Mental Content (Blackwell, 1989).