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person1960s-present

Thomas Nagel

Disciplines:
political philosophy
ethics
philosophy of mind

Summary

American philosopher who argued that consciousness involves subjective experience that cannot be explained by objective physical descriptions, and developed accounts of moral luck, political philosophy, and the limits of objective reason.

Core Contribution

What Is It Like to Be a Bat: consciousness has an irreducible subjective character — there is something it is like to be a bat — that cannot be captured by any objective physical account; this is the hard problem of consciousness. The View from Nowhere: the tension between subjective and objective standpoints is irreducible — it generates problems in ethics, knowledge, and freedom. Moral Luck: many morally significant differences between people are the result of factors outside their control.

Key Spikes & Highlights

  • Mind and Cosmos (2012) argued that neo-Darwinian materialism is almost certainly false because consciousness cannot be explained by it — was attacked ferociously by scientific commentators, generating an unusual amount of public vitriol for an academic philosophy book.
  • What Is It Like to Be a Bat is one of the most cited philosophy papers ever written — the question is simple but the argument is devastating: any third-person physical account leaves out the first-person character of experience.
  • Was Thomas Scanlon's closest philosophical colleague for decades at Harvard/NYU — their complementary projects (Nagel on the view from nowhere, Scanlon on contractualism) represent the two poles of post-Rawlsian ethics.

Notable Works & Achievements

Mortal Questions

The View from Nowhere

What Does It All Mean?

Equality and Partiality

Mind and Cosmos

Historical Influences

Immanuel Kant Thomas Scanlon

Intellectual Lineage

Analytic Philosophy Philosophy of Mind

Contemporaries & Peers

John Rawls Derek Parfit T.M. Scanlon

Minds Influenced

David Chalmers Susan Wolf

Intellectual Posterity

Hard Problem of Consciousness Moral LuckSubjective Character of Experience

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