Thomas Nagel (; born July 4, 1937) is an American postanalytic philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy, a professor of law, and University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University. From 2001 to 2003, he was the Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. His main areas of philosophical interest are political philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of mind.
After earning his doctorate from Harvard University under John Rawls, Nagel was a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1963 to 1966 and a professor at Princeton University from 1966 to 1980. In 1967, he and Robert Nozick co-founded an influential group of philosophers known as the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy. In the 1970s, Nagel also co-founded the philosophy journal Philosophy & Public Affairs.
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.
Early life and education
Nagel was born on July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. His parents, Carolyn () and Walter Nagel, were German Jewish refugees. He arrived in the U.S. in 1939 and was raised secular in New York City, but identifies as Jewish. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944.
Nagel graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy in 1958. As an undergraduate, he studied under the philosophers Norman Malcolm, Rogers Albritton, and John Rawls. He initially intended to major in physics, but, after developing an interest in philosophy, switched. After graduation, he won a Fulbright Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Philosophy from Corpus Christi College in 1960. There he studied under Paul Grice, Peter Strawson, H. L. A. Hart, G. E. M. Anscombe, G. E. L. Owen, Philippa Foot, and James Thomson. He was also one of the last students of J. L. Austin, who served as the advisor of his BPhil thesis.
In 1963, Nagel earned his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University, where he completed his dissertation under Rawls, who had moved from Cornell to Harvard. His professors at Harvard also included Willard Van Orman Quine and Noam Chomsky. He later called Rawls "the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century." As a doctoral student at Harvard, Nagel edited early drafts of Rawls's A Theory of Justice and befriended Gilbert Harman and Saul Kripke. His doctoral thesis was titled "Altruism".
Academic career Nagel taught 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, Shelly Kagan, and Samuel Scheffler, the last of whom is now his colleague at New York University.
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 a member of the American Philosophical Society. On October 9, 2017, he was elected as a corresponding fellow of the French Académie des sciences morales et politiques. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2008 he was awarded a Rolf Schock Prize for his work in philosophy, the Balzan Prize, and the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Oxford.
Philosophical work
Overview Nagel thinks each person, owing to their capacity to reason, instinctively seeks a unified worldview, but that 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. For contingent, limited, finite creatures, no such unified worldview is possible, because ways of understanding are not always better when they are more objective.
Like philosopher Bernard Williams, Nagel believes that the rise of modern science has permanently changed how people think of the world and our place in it. A modern scientific understanding is one way of thinking about the world and our place in it that is more objective than the commonsense view it replaces. It is more objective because it is less dependent on our peculiarities as the kinds of thinkers that people are. Our modern scientific understanding involves the mathematicized understanding of the world represented by modern physics. Understanding this bleached-out view of the world draws on our capacities as purely rational thinkers and fails to account for the specific nature of our perceptual sensibility. Nagel repeatedly returns to the distinction between certain qualities—that is, between primary qualities of objects like mass and shape, which are mathematically and structurally describable independent of our sensory apparatuses, and secondary qualities like taste and color, which depend on our sensory apparatuses.
Despite what may seem like skepticism about the objective claims of science, Nagel does not dispute that science describes the world that exists independently of us. His contention, rather, is that a given way of understanding a subject matter should not be regarded as better simply for being more objective. He argues that scientific understanding's attempt at an objective viewpoint—a "view from nowhere"—necessarily leaves out something essential when applied to the mind, which inherently has a subjective point of view. As such, objective science is fundamentally unable to help people fully understand themselves. In "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" and elsewhere, he writes that science cannot describe what it is like to be a thinker who conceives of the world from a particular subjective perspective.
Nagel argues that some phenomena are not best grasped from a more objective perspective. The standpoint of the thinker does not present itself to the thinker: they are that standpoint. One learns and uses mental concepts by being directly acquainted with one's own mind, whereas any attempt to think more objectively about mentality would abstract away from this fact. It would, of its nature, leave out what it is to be a thinker, and that, Nagel believes, would be a falsely objectifying view. Being a thinker is to have a subjective perspective on the world; if one abstracts away from this perspective one leaves out what he sought to explain.
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. They are right to be impressed—modern science really is objective—but wrong to take modern science to be the only paradigm of objectivity. The kind of understanding that science represents does not apply to everything people would like to understand.
As a philosophical rationalist, Nagel believes that a proper understanding of the place of mental properties in nature will involve a revolution in our understanding of the physical and the mental, and that this is a reasonable prospect that people can anticipate in the near future. A plausible science of the mind will give an account of the stuff that underpins mental and physical properties in such a way that people will simply be able to see that it necessitates both of these aspects. Now, it seems to people that the mental and the physical are irreducibly distinct, but that is not a metaphysical insight, or an acknowledgment of an irreducible explanatory gap, but simply where people are at their present stage of understanding.
Nagel's rationalism and tendency to present human nature as composite, structured around our capacity to reason, explains why he thinks that therapeutic or deflationary accounts of philosophy are complacent and that radical skepticism is, strictly speaking, irrefutable. The therapeutic or deflationary philosopher, influenced by Wittgenstein's later philosophy, reconciles people to the dependence of our worldview on our "form of life". Nagel accuses Wittgenstein and American philosopher of mind and language Donald Davidson of philosophical idealism.Nagel, Thomas. 1986, The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Chapter VI. Both ask people to take up an interpretative perspective to making sense of other speakers in the context of a shared, objective world. This, for Nagel, elevates contingent conditions of our makeup into criteria for what is real. The result "cuts the world down to size" and makes what there is dependent on what there can be interpreted to be. Nagel claims this is no better than more orthodox forms of idealism in which reality is claimed to be made up of mental items, or constitutively dependent on a form supplied by the mind.
Philosophy of mind
What is it like to be a something
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. 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 asked by Timothy Sprigge. The article was originally published in 1974 in The Philosophical Review, and has been reprinted several times, including in 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), The Nature of Mind (edited by David M. Rosenthal), 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 writes, "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), p. 436. In the 50th-anniversary republication of his article in book form, Nagel writes that he "tried to show that the irreducible subjectivity of consciousness is an obstacle to many proposed solutions to the mind-body problem."Nagel, Thomas (2024). What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Oxford University Press, p. vii. His critics have objected to what they see as a misguided attempt to argue from a fact about how one represents the world (trivially, one can only do so from one's point of view) to a false claim about the world, that it somehow has first-personal perspectives built into it. On that understanding, Nagel is a conventional dualist about the physical and the mental. This is, however, a misunderstanding: Nagel's point is that there is a constraint on what it is to possess the concept of a mental state, namely, that one be directly acquainted with it. Concepts of mental states are only made available to a thinker who can be acquainted with their own states; clearly, the possession and use of physical concepts has no corresponding constraint.