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Thomas Nagel

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Thomas Nagel

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American philosopher

Person · Open Library

Born
1937
Works
74

Top works

  • Mah ha-mashmaʻut shel kol zeh?
  • Altruism
  • Mortal questions
  • מה המשמעות של כל זה?
  • What does it all mean?

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Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Country
DE
Active from
1976-06-05

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Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
23
Total plays
59

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Quotes

  • Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
  • Consciousness is what makes the mind–body problem really intractable.
  • Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.
  • Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed.
  • [E]very subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective physical theory will abandon that point of view.
  • Bats … present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

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Key facts

Born
( 1937-07-04 ) July 4, 1937 (age 88) , Belgrade , Kingdom of Yugoslavia (now Serbia )
Spouses
Doris G. Blum ​ ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1954 ; divorced</span>"}]]}'>div. 1973 ) ​ Anne Hollander ​ ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1979 ; died 2014 ) ​ Susan Chace ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 2022 ) ​
Awards
Balzan Prize (2008) Rolf Schock Prize (2008)
Education
Cornell University ( BA ) Corpus Christi College, Oxford ( BPhil ) Harvard University ( PhD )
Thesis
Altruism (1963)
Doctoral advisor
John Rawls
Other advisor
J. L. Austin
Era
Contemporary philosophy
Discipline
Philosophy
Sub discipline
Epistemology ethics legal philosophy philosophy of mind political philosophy
Region
Western philosophy
School or tradition
Analytic , Postanalytic
Institutions
New York University Princeton University University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral students
Marcelo Alegre [ es ] Rebecca Goldstein Shelly Kagan Samuel Scheffler Susan Wolf
Notable works
" What Is It Like to Be a Bat? " (1974) The View from Nowhere (1986) Mind and Cosmos (2012)
Notable ideas
Panpsychism subjective character of experience what is it like to be a something

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Official website

Human Verification

nyu.edu

Link to the official site · 620 chars · not written by Vinony

Wikidata facts

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Thomas Nagel (cropped).jpg
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Commons category
Thomas Nagel
date of birth
1937-07-04
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~33 min read

Article

Thomas Nagel (/ˈneɪɡəl/; born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher. He is University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University, where he taught from 1980 until his retirement in 2016. His main areas of philosophical interest are political philosophy, ethics and philosophy of mind.

Nagel is known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings. He continued the critique of reductionism in Mind and Cosmos (2012), in which he argues against the neo-Darwinian view of the emergence of consciousness.

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