Thomas Nagel facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Thomas Nagel
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Nagel in 1978
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| Born | July 4, 1937 |
| Nationality | American |
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Notable work
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| Thesis | Altruism (1963) |
| Doctoral advisor | John Rawls |
| Other academic advisors | J. L. Austin |
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Thomas Nagel (born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher. A philosopher is someone who studies basic questions about knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. He was a professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University until he retired in 2016. His main interests in philosophy include how we think, what is right and wrong, and how societies should be governed.
Nagel is well-known for disagreeing with ideas that try to explain the mind only by looking at physical things. He wrote about this in his famous essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974). He also wrote important ideas about fairness and how societies should be run in his book The Possibility of Altruism (1970). In his later book, Mind and Cosmos (2012), he continued to question ideas that try to reduce everything to simple physical explanations. He argued against the common view of how consciousness (our ability to think and feel) developed.
Contents
Life and Career Highlights
Thomas Nagel was born on July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, which was then part of Yugoslavia (now Serbia). His parents were German Jewish refugees. He came to the United States in 1939 and grew up near New York City. He did not have a religious upbringing, but he considers himself Jewish.
Nagel earned his first college degree in philosophy from Cornell University in 1958. There, he learned about the ideas of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He then went to the University of Oxford in England on a special scholarship called a Fulbright Scholarship. He received another philosophy degree in 1960, studying with J. L. Austin and Paul Grice.
He earned his highest degree, a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), from Harvard University in 1963. At Harvard, his teacher was John Rawls, whom Nagel later called "the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century."
Nagel taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1963 to 1966. He then taught at Princeton University from 1966 to 1980. During his time there, he taught many students who later became famous philosophers themselves, like Susan Wolf and Shelly Kagan.
He is a member of important academic groups, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2008, he received the Rolf Schock Prize and the Balzan Prize for his work in philosophy. He also received an honorary degree from the University of Oxford.
Nagel's Philosophical Ideas
Thinking About the World
Nagel started publishing his philosophical ideas when he was 22 years old. His career has now lasted over 60 years. He believes that people naturally try to understand the world in a complete way. However, he thinks it's a mistake to believe there's only one way to understand everything.
He argues that a single, unified view of the world isn't possible for humans. This is because some ways of understanding things are not always better just because they are more "objective."
Nagel believes that modern science has changed how people think about the world. Science gives us a very objective way to understand things, like how physics describes the world using math. This scientific view is less about our personal feelings or senses.
He often talks about "primary" and "secondary" qualities of objects. Primary qualities are things like mass and shape, which can be described with math no matter who is looking at them. Secondary qualities are things like taste and color, which depend on our senses.
The "View from Nowhere"
Nagel doesn't doubt that science describes the world as it truly is. However, he argues that science's attempt to get an "objective viewpoint"—a "view from nowhere"—misses something important when it tries to understand the mind. The mind, he says, always has a personal, "subjective" point of view.
Because of this, objective science cannot fully help us understand ourselves. In his famous essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", he explains that science cannot describe what it is like to be a thinking being who sees the world from a specific personal perspective.
Nagel believes that some experiences are not best understood from a completely objective view. For example, you are your own point of view. You learn about mental concepts (like thinking or feeling) by directly experiencing your own mind. If you try to think about the mind in a purely objective way, you lose this personal experience. This would be a false way of understanding it.
He thinks that some philosophers, too impressed by science, create ideas about the mind that are too objective. While science is truly objective, he argues it's not the only way to understand everything. The kind of understanding science offers doesn't apply to everything we want to know.
Consciousness and Science
As a rationalist (someone who believes in reason as the main source of knowledge), Nagel thinks that understanding how our minds fit into nature will change how we see both the physical and mental worlds. He believes we might soon have a scientific breakthrough. This breakthrough would help us understand a basic "stuff" that creates both mental and physical properties.
Right now, it seems like the mental and physical are completely separate. But Nagel thinks this is just because of our current understanding. He believes a new scientific view will show how they are connected.
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Nagel is most famous in the study of the mind for his idea that consciousness (our awareness) and subjective experience (what it's like to be us) cannot be fully explained by just looking at physics. He wrote about this in his well-known article, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974).
In this article, Nagel argues that consciousness has a special "subjective character." This means there is always "something that it is like to be an organism that is conscious. In a later edition of his article, he wrote that the personal nature of consciousness makes it hard to solve the "mind-body problem." This problem asks how the mind and body are connected.
Some critics have misunderstood Nagel, thinking he means that minds are completely separate from bodies (a view called dualism). But Nagel's point is that to truly understand a mental state, you have to experience it yourself. You can't just describe it physically.
He also points out that our imagination works in two ways. We can imagine something physically (like how a bat's brain works). But we can also imagine something empathetically (like what it feels like to be a bat). These two ways of imagining are so different that it always seems like there's a gap between physical descriptions and mental experiences.
Nagel is not a physicalist (someone who believes everything can be explained by physics) because he thinks mental concepts are not like chemical elements with hidden physical essences. However, his doubt is about current physics. He hopes that in the future, we might find a scientific explanation for an underlying essence that connects physical, mental, and functional aspects of the mind.
Natural Selection and Consciousness
In his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos, Nagel questions the common idea that life and consciousness appeared purely by chance through natural selection. He argues that this view goes against common sense. He suggests that the mind is a basic part of nature. He believes that any philosophy that cannot explain the mind is wrong.
He thinks that the rules explaining how life appeared might be teleological. This means they might have a purpose or goal, rather than being purely random or mechanical. Even though Nagel is an atheist and does not support intelligent design (ID), his book was praised by some who believe in creationism.
Nagel believes that intelligent design should not be dismissed as unscientific. He wrote in 2008 that the debate about ID is "clearly a scientific disagreement." In Mind and Cosmos, he said that ID supporters like Stephen C. Meyer "do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met."
Ethics and Fairness
Nagel's Ideas on Morality
Nagel has greatly influenced the fields of moral and political philosophy. He was taught by John Rawls and has long supported a Kantian (based on the ideas of philosopher Immanuel Kant) and rationalist approach to moral philosophy. His early ideas were in his book The Possibility of Altruism (1970).
This book explores how we reason about what is right and wrong. Nagel argues that when we act morally, we are driven by both a belief and a desire. But he stresses that the reason for the action is what truly justifies it.
A key idea in his book is that thinking about our own future interests is very similar to thinking about what is good for other people. For example, if you know a hurricane might destroy your car next year, you buy insurance now. The future need (replacing the car) gives you a reason to act now. Nagel says that denying this means you don't truly believe you are the same person over time.
Helping Others (Altruism)
This idea helps explain altruistic actions, where you act for someone else's good. If someone else's reasons are truly important and timeless, then they become reasons for you too. Nagel believes that true reasons are reasons for anyone. Like the 19th-century philosopher Henry Sidgwick, Nagel thinks we should see our own good as a general good, and our reasons as objective reasons.
Someone who disagrees with this, Nagel argues, has a false view of themselves. They might think their reasons are only for them, not for anyone else. Nagel calls this "dissociation," which is like a practical version of solipsism (the idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist). He argues that this wrong way of thinking about reasons leads to a false idea about human nature.
Personal vs. Universal Reasons
In his later work, Nagel started talking about "agent-relative" and "agent-neutral" reasons. Agent-relative reasons are personal. For example, "Anyone has a reason to honor his or her parents." This reason depends on who you are.
Agent-neutral reasons are universal. For example, "Anyone has a reason to promote the good of parenthood." This reason doesn't depend on who you are.
Nagel's later ethical ideas suggest that all reasons should be connected to an objective view of ourselves. Reasons that stand up to careful thought are objective. But more personal reasons can still be accepted. He believes that agent-neutral reasons are literally reasons for everyone. So, all objective reasons become important to each person, no matter whose they are.
Fairness in Society
Nagel's ideas about individual well-being and respecting others naturally lead to political philosophy. In his book Equality and Partiality, Nagel closely examines John Rawls's ideas about justice. Nagel believes that Rawls's view of liberal equality is not demanding enough. He thinks it doesn't fully respect the needs of others.
Nagel suggests that we need to move towards much stronger ideas of equality. He argues that the state (the government) is a collective agent. This means the state is responsible for what it fails to do, not just what it does. A Rawlsian state, he argues, might allow unfair differences. Nagel believes that honoring the objective point of view requires a more ambitious idea of equality.
Views on Atheism
In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel states that he is an atheist. An atheist is someone who does not believe in God. He wrote, "I lack the feeling that makes so many people see a divine purpose in the world."
In another book, The Last Word, he wrote, "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God... It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that."
The Value of Experience
Nagel has also shared his thoughts on what makes life good. He said, "There are elements which, if added to one's experience, make life better; there are other elements which if added to one's experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its consequences." This means that simply having experiences, even without specific good or bad outcomes, adds value to life.
Personal Life
Nagel married Doris Blum in 1954, and they divorced in 1973. In 1979, he married Anne Hollander, who passed away in 2014.
Awards and Recognition
Nagel has received several important awards for his work:
- 1996: PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for his book Other Minds.
- 2006: Distinguished Achievement Award from the Mellon Foundation.
- 2008: Balzan Prize in Moral Philosophy.
- 2008: Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Selected Publications
Books
- The Possibility of Altruism (1970)
- Mortal Questions (1979)
- The View from Nowhere (1986)
- What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (1987)
- Equality and Partiality (1991)
- Other Minds: Critical Essays, 1969–1994 (1995)
- The Last Word (1997)
- Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays (2002)
- Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002–2008 (2009)
- Mind and Cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. (2012)
Important Articles
- 1974, "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?", Philosophical Review
- 1976, "Moral Luck", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary
- 1998, "Concealment and Exposure", Philosophy & Public Affairs
- 2008, "Public Education and Intelligent Design", Philosophy and Public Affairs
See also
- American philosophy
- List of American philosophers
- New York University Department of Philosophy
- David Chalmers
- Hard problem of consciousness
- Knowledge argument
- Phenomenology
- Neutral monism
