Thomas Nagel Quotes on Knowledge
Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (1986), Mortal Questions (1979), and the late Mind and Cosmos (2012) give late twentieth-century analytic philosophy one of its most influential treatments of the constitutive partiality of human knowledge. The central thesis is that knowledge proceeds through the perpetual negotiation of the irreducibly subjective view from somewhere — the embodied perspective in which conscious experience is given — and the objective view from nowhere that the sciences and impartial moral reasoning approximate, with the resulting tension at the heart of the human cognitive situation rather than a defect to be eliminated. The framework grounds Nagel’s parallel work in the philosophy of mind (“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”) and his late argument that the standard naturalistic worldview cannot accommodate the actual character of consciousness, value, and reason.
Quotes
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“I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.”
p. 168. -
Attributed to Thomas Nagel:
“An objective view from nowhere offers part of the truth, but only part.”
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“The Last Word, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 130-131.”
In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking -
“Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.”
Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays (1998). -
“Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays (1998).”
Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions. -
“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.”
p. 167. -
“Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experience of bats, if we only knew what they were like.”
p. 169. -
“Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.”
The View From Nowhere(1986) | p. 16.