Early Life and Education
McGinn was born in West Hartlepool, County Durham, England, the eldest of three sons, and was raised in Gillingham, Kent, and Blackpool, Lancashire. His father, Joseph, was a building manager, and several relatives, including both grandfathers, were miners. He attended secondary modern school in Blackpool, then a local grammar school for his A-levels. He went on to study psychology at Manchester University, obtaining a first-class honours degree in 1971 and his MA in 1972, also in psychology.
He was admitted in 1972 to Jesus College, Oxford, at first to study for a Bachelor of Letters postgraduate degree, but he switched to the Bachelor of Philosophy (B.Phil.) programme on the recommendation of his advisor, Michael R. Ayers. He won the John Locke Prize in 1973, a prestigious prize in philosophy. He received his B.Phil. in 1974, writing a thesis under the supervision of Ayers and P. F. Strawson on the semantics of Donald Davidson.
Read more about this topic: Colin McGinn
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
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“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”
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