Reached in Miami, where he said he was in the middle of reviewing another book, Mr. McGinn described the notion that he was motivated by a decades-old grudge as “absurd.” “We didn’t get on philosophically,” he said, “but from a personal point of view, we got on perfectly fine.”

Mr. Honderich, he said, “maintains the review was so negative because there’s a feud instead of because his book is so bad.” He said that he remembered the comment about his ex-girlfriend, but that he considered it no more than a “bit vulgar and crass” and “certainly didn’t nurse it for 25 years.”

“There was no feud before. It was just a negative review,” he said, acknowledging that “it was the most negative review I’ve ever written.”

Whether criticism should be so harsh is a legitimate issue, Mr. McGinn said. He said that though some might call him aggressive, “rightly or wrongly it was my intellectual judgment.”

The view from Cornell, The Philosophical Review’s home, is that the fuss is overblown. Mr. Sturgeon said that Mr. McGinn had been chosen to review the book, published in 2004, because “he is a recognized expert on issues of consciousness.” The review did prompt a discussion among the editors, Mr. Sturgeon said, which was why they asked Mr. McGinn to take out a parody of Mr. Honderich’s writing style.

“I can understand Honderich’s being aggrieved” by the review, Mr. Sturgeon said, “but it is not outside the accepted standards of the discipline.”

Image Colin McGinn Credit... ColinMcGinnBlog.com

“The review is unusual,” he added, but “by no means unprecedented.”

The question of publishing a further exchange was raised at a departmental meeting last month attended by nearly all the members of the editorial board, Mr. Sturgeon said, and everyone agreed there was no compelling reason to make an exception to the journal’s policy.