Thomas Nagel Book order

Exploring the irreducible subjectivity of consciousness, this classic work significantly influenced the fields of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. It highlights the importance of understanding consciousness in non-human animals, prompting extensive scientific inquiry into various species. The fiftieth-anniversary edition also features a second essay where Nagel presents his updated views on the mind-body problem, providing a contemporary perspective on the issues raised in the original article.

This volume presents two closely related essays by Thomas Nagel: "Gut Feelings and Moral Knowledge," discusses the value of intuitions in understanding human rights and argues against subjectivist and reductionist accounts of morality of the kind offered by evolutionary psychology or based on brain scans. The second essay, "Moral Reality and Moral Progress," proposes an account of the historical development of moral truth, according to which it does not share the timelessness of scientific truth. This is because moral truth must be based on reasons that are accessible to the individuals to whom they apply, and such accessibility depends on historical developments. The result is that only some advances in moral knowledge are discoveries of what has been true all along.

This book collects Thomas Nagel's recent philosophical reflections on topics of fundamental interest: ethics, moral psychology, science and religion, death, the holocaust, and the metaphysics of mind. The essays are all addressed to a general audience and should appeal not only to philosophers but to anyone interested in current attempts to understand human life, human values, and how we fit into the world. Among the figures discussed are Peter Singer, Alvin Plantinga, Christine Korsgaard, Tony Judt, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, T. M. Scanlon, Ronald Dworkin, Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, and Daniel Dennett. An accessible overview of some of the significant philosophy of our time.

In Mind and Cosmos Thomas Nagel argues that the widely accepted world view of materialist naturalism is untenable. The mind-body problem cannot be confined to the relation between animal minds and animal bodies. If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. No such explanation is available, and the physical sciences, including molecular biology, cannot be expected to provide one. The book explores these problems through a general treatment of the obstacles to reductionism, with more specific application to the phenomena of consciousness, cognition, and value. The conclusion is that physics cannot be the theory of everything.

Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions explores some fundamental issues concerning the meaning, nature and value of human life.

In this cogent and accessible introduction to philosophy, the distinguished author of Mortal Questions and The View From Nowhere sets forth the central problems of philosophical inquiry for the beginning student.

Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way, but at the same time each of us is a particular person in a particular place, each with his own "personal" view of the world. Thomas Nagel's ambitious and lively book tackles this fundamental issue, arguing that our divided nature is the root of a whole range of philosophical problems, touching every aspect of human life. He deals with its manifestations in such fields of philosophy as the mind-body problem, personal identity, knowledge and skepticism, thought and reality, free will, ethics, the relation between moral and other values, the meaning of life, and death.

Just as there are rational requirements on thought, there are rational requirements on action. This book defends a conception of ethics, and a related conception of human nature, according to which altruism is included among the basic rational requirements on desire and action.