Thomas Nagel
Born 1937
From Belgrade, City of Belgrade, Serbia · Nationality: United States · Writes nonfiction
American moral and political theorist. Born in the former Yugoslavia, Nagel was educated at Cornell, Oxford, and Harvard. He taught at Princeton from 1966 to 1980, and subsequently at New York University. His work is centrally concerned with the nature of moral motivation and the possibility of a rational theory of moral and political commitment, and has been a major stimulus to interest in realistic and Kantian approaches to these issues. One of the most discussed papers of modern philosophy of mind has been his ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’, arguing that there is an irreducible, subjective aspect of experience that cannot be grasped by the objective methods of natural science, or by philosophies such as functionalism that confine themselves to those methods. Works include The Possibility of Altruism (1970), Mortal Questions (1979), The View from Nowhere (1986), and Equality and Partiality (1991). Source: The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
Quotes
“Consciousness is what makes the mind–body problem really intractable.”
What is it like to be a bat?, p. 165 “Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like.”
What is it like to be a bat?, p. 169 “It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now.”
Mortal Questions, p. 11 “A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental effort of will.”
Mortal Questions, p. 32 “Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.”
The View From Nowhere, p. 12
Quotes from Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Books by Thomas Nagel in order
Books by Thomas Nagel in the order they were published, from Hobbes's Concept of Obligation (1959) to Her Şey Ne Anlama Geliyor? (2019).
- 1Hobbes's Concept of ObligationHobbes's Concept of Obligation1959
- 2The Possibility of Altruism
The Possibility of Altruism1970 - 3The Rights And Wrongs Of Abortion
The Rights And Wrongs Of Abortion1974 - 4Mortal Questions
Mortal Questions1979 - 5The View from Nowhere
The View from Nowhere1986 - 6What Does It All Mean?
What Does It All Mean?1987 - 7Other Minds
Other Minds1999 - 8La última palabra
La última palabra2000 - 9The Last Word
The Last Word2001 - 10Concealment and Exposure
Concealment and Exposure2002 - 11The Myth of Ownership
The Myth of Ownership2002 - 12Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament
Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament2009 - 13Mind and Cosmos
Mind and Cosmos2012 - 14Was Bedeutet Das Alles?
Was Bedeutet Das Alles?2012 - 15Zihin Ve Evren
Zihin Ve Evren2015 - 16Her Şey Ne Anlama Geliyor?
Her Şey Ne Anlama Geliyor?2019