Thomas Nagel (born 1937) is an American philosopher, currently University Professor
and Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. His main areas of philosophical interest
are philosophy of mind, political
philosophy, and ethics. He is well-known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the
mind in his essay "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and
political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970).
Biography
Thomas Nagel was born July 4, 1937 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia); his family was Jewish. He received a BA from Cornell University in 1958, a
BPhil from Oxford University in
1960, and a PhD from Harvard University in 1963 under the supervision of John Rawls.
Before settling in New York, Nagel taught briefly at the University of
California, Berkeley (from 1963 to 1966) and at Princeton University (from
1966 to 1980). In 2006, he was made a member of the American Philosophical
Society.[1]
Nagel is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and a Fellow of the British Academy, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National
Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the
Humanities.[2]
Work
Much of Nagel's work concerns the tension between objective and subjective perspectives: on reasons for action, on agency, on
experience, the mind, and on reality as a whole.
For many years, Nagel has conducted a seminar noted for an array of guest speakers with his
colleague Ronald Dworkin.
Philosophy of mind
Nagel is probably most widely known within the field of philosophy of mind as an
advocate of the idea that consciousness and subjective
experience cannot be reduced to brain activity. This position was primarily discussed by
Nagel in one of his most famous articles: "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974). The article's title question, though often
attributed to Nagel, was originally posed by Timothy L.S. Sprigge. The article was
originally published in 1974 in The Philosophical
Review. However, the essay has been reprinted in several books that are concerned with consciousness and the mind, such as The
Mind's I (edited by Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology (edited by Ned Block), Nagel's
Mortal Questions (1979), and Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary
Readings (edited by David J. Chalmers).
In "What is it Like to Be a Bat?", Nagel argues that consciousness has essential to it
a subjective character, a what it is like aspect. He states that "an organism has conscious mental states if and
only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."[3] Nagel also suggests that the subjective aspect of the mind may
not ever be sufficiently accounted for by the objective methods of
reductionistic science. He claims that "[i]f we acknowledge that a physical
theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience, we must admit that no presently available conception
gives us a clue how this could be done."[4] Furthermore, he
states that "it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the
general problem of subjective and objective."[5]
While Nagel is sometimes categorized as a dualist for these sorts of
remarks, he is more precisely categorized as an anti-reductionist. Nagel (1998) writes:
| “ |
...I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the
physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind
of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite
significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue
to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails—simply in virtue of our mental concepts—that the
system is conscious.[6] |
” |
Ethics
In ethics, Nagel is known for his contributions to deontological (non-consequentialist) ethics and liberal political theory. In
The Possibility of Altruism (1970), Nagel defends altruism. In a Neo-Kantian vein, he
argues that people can have good reason to commit acts that benefit another without the expectation of benefit for oneself and
without being motivated by factors such as sympathy.
Along with Bernard Williams, he has also contributed much to the early development
of the problem of moral luck, detailing its various aspects, and analyzing its impact on
ethics and moral evaluation.
Selected publications
Books
- The Possibility of Altruism (1970), Oxford University Press. (Reprinted in 1978, Princeton University Press.)
- Mortal Questions (1979), Cambridge University Press.
- The View from Nowhere (1986), Oxford University Press.
- What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (1987), Oxford University Press.
- Equality and Partiality (1991), Oxford University Press.
- Other Minds: Critical Essays, 1969-1994 (1995), Oxford University Press.
- The Last Word (1997), Oxford University Press.
- The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice (2002), (with Liam Murphy) Oxford University Press.
- Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays (2002), Oxford University Press.
Articles
- 1959, "Hobbes's Concept of Obligation", Philosophical Review, pp. 68-83.
- 1959, "Dreaming", Analysis, pp. 112-6.
- 1965, "Physicalism", Philosophical Review, pp. 339-56.
- 1969, "Sexual Perversion", Journal of Philosophy, pp. 5-17.
- 1969, "The Boundaries of Inner Space", Journal of Philosophy, pp. 452-8.
- 1970, "Death", Nous, pp. 73-80.
- 1970, "Armstrong on the Mind", Philosophical Review, pp. 394-403 (a discussion review of A Materialist Theory of
the Mind by D. M. Armstrong).
- 1971, "Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness", Synthese, pp. 396-413.
- 1971, "The Absurd", Journal of Philosophy, pp. 716-27.
- 1972, "War and Massacre", Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 1, pp. 123-44.
- 1973, "Rawls on Justice", Philosophical Review, pp. 220-34 (a discussion review of A Theory of Justice by John Rawls).
- 1973, "Equal Treatment and Compensatory Discrimination", Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 2, pp. 348-62.
- 1974, "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?", Philosophical Review, pp. 435-50. Online text
- 1976, "Moral Luck", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary vol. 50, pp. 137-55.
- 1979, "The Meaning of Equality", Washington University Law Quarterly, pp. 25-31.
- 1981, "Tactical Nuclear Weapons and the Ethics of Conflict", Parameters: Journal of the U.S. Army War College, pp.
327-8.
- 1983, "The Objective Self", in Carl Ginet and Sydney Shoemaker (eds.), Knowledge and Mind, Oxford University Press,
pp. 211-232.
- 1987, "Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy", Philosophy & Public Affairs, pp. 215-240.
- 1994, "Consciousness and Objective Reality", in R. Warner and T. Szubka (eds.), The Mind-Body Problem, Blackwell.
- 1995, "Personal Rights and Public Space", Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 83-107.
- 1997, "Assisted Suicide: The Philosophers' Brief" (with R. Dworkin, R. Nozick, J. Rawls, T. Scanlon, and J. J. Thomson),
New York Review of Books, March 27, 1997.
- 1998, "Reductionism and Antireductionism", in The Limits of Reductionism in Biology, Novartis Symposium 213, John
Wiley & Sons, pp. 3-10.
- 1998, "Concealment and Exposure", Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 3-30. Online text
- 1998, "Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem", Philosophy, vol. 73, no. 285, pp. 337-352. Online PDF
- 2000, "The Psychophysical Nexus", in Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke (eds.) New Essays on the A Priori,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 432-471. Online PDF
- 2003, "Rawls and Liberalism", in Samuel Freeman (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, Cambridge University Press,
pp. 62-85.
- 2003, "John Rawls and Affirmative Action", The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 39, pp. 82-4.
References
External links
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