32 Facts About Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel is the University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University, where he taught from 1980 to 2016.

Thomas Nagel continued the critique of reductionism in Mind and Cosmos, in which he argues against the neo-Darwinian view of the emergence of consciousness.

Thomas Nagel was born on July 4,1937, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, to German Jewish refugees Carolyn and Walter Thomas Nagel.

Thomas Nagel arrived in the US in 1939, and was raised in and around New York.

Thomas Nagel had no religious upbringing, but regards himself as a Jew.

Thomas Nagel received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Cornell University in 1958, where he was a member of the Telluride House and was introduced to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Thomas Nagel received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963.

Thomas Nagel taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Princeton University, where he trained many well-known philosophers, including Susan Wolf, Shelly Kagan, and Samuel Scheffler, the last of whom is his colleague at New York University.

Thomas Nagel is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and, in 2006, was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Thomas Nagel has held a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Thomas Nagel began to publish philosophy at age 22; his career now spans over 60 years of publication.

Thomas Nagel thinks that each person, owing to their capacity to reason, instinctively seeks a unified world view, but if this aspiration leads one to believe that there is only one way to understand our intellectual commitments, whether about the external world, knowledge, or what our practical and moral reasons ought to be, one errs.

Thomas Nagel argues that some phenomena are not best grasped from a more objective perspective.

Thomas Nagel thinks that philosophers, over-impressed by the paradigm of the kind of objective understanding represented by modern science, tend to produce theories of the mind that are falsely objectifying in precisely this kind of way.

Thomas Nagel accuses Wittgenstein and American philosopher of mind and language Donald Davidson of philosophical idealism.

This, for Thomas Nagel, elevates contingent conditions of our makeup into criteria for what is real.

Thomas Nagel is probably most widely known in philosophy of mind as an advocate of the idea that consciousness and subjective experience cannot, at least with the contemporary understanding of physicalism, be satisfactorily explained with the concepts of physics.

The article's title question, though often attributed to Thomas Nagel, was originally asked by Timothy Sprigge.

On that understanding, Thomas Nagel is a conventional dualist about the physical and the mental.

Part of the puzzlement here is because of the limitations of imagination: influenced by his Princeton colleague Saul Kripke, Thomas Nagel believes that any type identity statement that identifies a physical state type with a mental state type would be, if true, necessarily true.

Thomas Nagel is not a physicalist because he does not believe that an internal understanding of mental concepts shows them to have the kind of hidden essence that underpins a scientific identity in, say, chemistry.

The difference between the kind of explanation he rejects and the kind he accepts depends on his understanding of transparency: from his earliest work to his most recent Thomas Nagel has always insisted that a prior context is required to make identity statements plausible, intelligible and transparent.

Thomas Nagel writes that mind is a basic aspect of nature, and that any philosophy of nature that cannot account for it is fundamentally misguided.

Thomas Nagel writes in Mind and Cosmos that he disagrees with both ID defenders and their opponents, who argue that the only naturalistic alternative to ID is the current reductionist neo-Darwinian model.

Thomas Nagel has been highly influential in the related fields of moral and political philosophy.

Thomas Nagel defends motivated desire theory about the motivation of moral action.

The denial of this view of prudence, Thomas Nagel argues, means that one does not really believe that one is one and the same person through time.

Thomas Nagel calls this "dissociation" and considers it a practical analogue of solipsism.

Thomas Nagel provides an extended rationale for the importance to people of their personal point of view.

Thomas Nagel recommends a gradual move to much more demanding conceptions of equality, motivated by the special nature of political responsibility.

For Thomas Nagel, honoring the objective point of view demands nothing less.

Thomas Nagel has been awarded the Balzan Prize in Moral Philosophy, the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Mellon Foundation.