Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel
Era	21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Philosophy of mind, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Epistemology

Thomas Nagel (born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher, currently University Professor and Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. 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) and subsequent writings.

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), where he trained many well-known philosophers including Susan Wolf and Samuel Scheffler, who is now his colleague at NYU. In 2006, he was made a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Nagel is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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, at least with the contemporary understanding of physicalism, 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." 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." 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."

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.

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 f 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.

External links

• Thomas Nagel's faculty webpage - New York Univ.
• Thomas Nagel's CV (PDF) - New York Univ.
• On John Rawls - interview conducted a week after John Rawl's death (audio recording)