Thomas Nagel Quotes on Mind
Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974) reframed twentieth-century philosophy of mind by focusing attention on the qualitative character of conscious experience as the principal obstacle to any reductive program. The bat's echolocatory experience, Nagel argues, is structurally accessible to objective scientific description but constitutively beyond the reach of any third-personal account of what that experience is like for the bat. The View from Nowhere (1986) develops the larger argument that human inquiry must continually negotiate the tension between the subjective standpoint and the objective view from nowhere, and that the recurring dualisms of mind and body, free will and determinism, ethics and metaethics arise from the ineliminability of both perspectives.
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:
“The mind-body problem is not just a local problem about consciousness; it is a problem about the world.”
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Attributed to Thomas Nagel:
“Reason has a proper authority over the will, even when it conflicts with our private interests.”
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Attributed to Thomas Nagel:
“Materialism, taken as a complete account of nature, is almost certainly false.”
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“I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism , and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the ”
Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem," Royal Institute of Philosophy annual lecture, given in London on February 18, 1998, published in Philosophy vol. 73 no. 285, July 1998, pp 337-352, Cambridge University Press, p. 337. -
“Consciousness is what makes the mind–body problem really intractable.”
p. 165. -
“Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.”
p. 166. -
“Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.”
The View From Nowhere(1986) | p. 12. -
“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.