Mysterianism and Skepticism

The article discusses the proposals for replying to the skeptical challenge developed by the socalled Neo-mysterians, and more particularly by the most eloquent of them, Colin McGinn. McGinn’s version of mysterianism, which he labels “Transcendental Naturalism,” is a very candid and rigorous form of scientific naturalism since (contrary to the standard naturalistic views) it is prepared to concede both that the attempts to reduce philosophically controversial phenomena – such as knowledge, free will, consciousness, meaning and the self – do not work and that those phenomena cannot be eliminated from our worldview. But McGinn is criticized nonetheless since he concludes from such irreducibility and ineliminability that, for our species at least, philosophical riddles will always remain unsolvable “mysteries.” It is argued that a much more plausible conclusion would be to question the legitimacy of some of the premises from which McGinn draws his “mysterian” conclusion. More specifically, it is claimed that McGinn’s thesis that genuine explanations have to have a bottom-up, aggregative format is an unreasonable one.