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:
“Men and women are not born inconstant: they are made so by their early amorous experiences.”
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967)
“So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,—both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his WIT—as his RESISTANCE.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)