Thinker · TH-0407
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, born in Belgrade, who taught at Berkeley and Princeton before a long career at New York University. His…
b. 1937 · Berkeley, Princeton, New York (NYU)
Traditions: Analytic
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, born in Belgrade, who taught at Berkeley and Princeton before a long career at New York University. His essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" argued that the subjective character of experience resists capture by objective, physical description, a point that shaped later debate on the hard problem of consciousness. He has also written on death as a deprivation of goods, on moral luck, on altruism, and on the tension between the subjective and the objective standpoints.
Key ideas
- An organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism.
- Objective physical descriptions leave out the subjective point of view.
- Death is bad for the one who dies because it deprives them of goods they would otherwise have had.
- Philosophy must reconcile the view from within with the view from nowhere.
Major works
- The Possibility of Altruism (1970)
- "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974)
- Mortal Questions (1979)
- The View from Nowhere (1986)
In the conversation
- Question My daughter asked where her mind is kept. Is Ryle’s ‘category mistake’ the answer?
- Question When someone dies, whose loss is grief about: theirs or ours?
- Debate Epicurus’s argument about death still works if you throw away the atoms
- Discussion Everyone already knew: what truth commissions teach about common knowledge
- Question How can death be bad for someone who no longer exists to be harmed?
- Reading group Reading group: Nagel’s bat, Chalmers’s hard problem and Dennett’s case against qualia