Background

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

Education

Thomas Nagel received a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University in 1958, a Bachelor of Philosophy from Oxford University in 1960, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University in 1963 under the supervision of John Rawls.

Career

Before settling in New York, Nagel taught briefly 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.

Сurrently, Nagel is a University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and ethics.

Nagel is the author of a number of books. Most of his interests are treated in The View From Nowhere, which explores the subjective/objective opposition in a number of areas of philosophy, from the mind-body problem and the theory of knowledge to free will, ethics, the meaning of life, and the significance of death. Equality and Partiality extends the analysis to issues of political theory, social justice, and individual rights.

He holds honorary doctorates from Oxford University, Harvard University, and the University of Bucharest, and is the recipient of a Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Balzan Prize in Moral Philosophy.

Achievements

• Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor and Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and ethics. He is well-known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the mind in his essay "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Equality and Partiality

    (Derived from Thomas Nagel's Locke Lectures, Equality and ...)

    1991
  • The Last Word

    (In The Last Word, Thomas Nagel, one of the most influenti...)

    2001
  • Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False

    (The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously...)

    2012
  • Mortal Questions

    (Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions explores some fundamental...)

    1979
  • The View From Nowhere 1986

Religion

In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel notes that he is an atheist, writing, "I lack the sensus divinitatis that enables - indeed compels - so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purpose as naturally as they see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling."

Politics

Thomas Nagel argues that the state should be neutral between different conceptions of the good life. He thus commits himself to what has been called justificatory neutrality - the view that the state should not make policy on the basis that some forms of life are superior to others.

According to Nagel, liberalism is the conjunction of two ideas: (1) individuals should have the liberty of thought and speech and wide freedom to live their lives as they choose (so long as they do not harm others in certain ways), and (2) individuals in any society should be able to determine through majority rule the laws by which they are governed and should not be so unequal in status or wealth that they have unequal opportunities to participate in democratic decision making. Various traditional and modern versions of liberalism differ from each other in their interpretation of these ideals and in the relative importance they assign to them.

Views

Thomas Nagel was one of the first contemporary moral philosophers to challenge Hume's thesis that reason alone is incapable of motivating moral action. In The Possibility of Altruism (1969), he argued that, if Hume’s thesis is true, then the ordinary idea of prudence - i.e., the idea that one's future pains and pleasures are just as capable of motivating one to act (and to act now) as are one's present pains and pleasures - is incoherent. Once one accepts the rationality of prudence, he continued, a very similar line of argument would lead one to accept the rationality of altruism - i.e., the idea that the pains and pleasures of other individuals are just as capable of motivating one to act as are one's own pains and pleasures. This means that reason alone is capable of motivating moral action; hence, it is unnecessary to appeal to self-interest or to benevolent feelings. In later books, including The View from Nowhere (1986) and The Last Word (1997), Nagel continued to explore these ideas, but he made it clear that he did not support the strong thesis that some reviewers took to be implied by the argument of The Possibility of Altruism - that altruism is not merely rational but rationally required. His position was rather that altruism is one among several courses of action open to rational beings.

Quotations: "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."

Membership

In 2006, Nagel was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

• 

  American Philosophical Society

  2006

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences

• 

  British Academy

• Guggenheim Foundation

• 

  National Science Foundation

• 

  National Endowment for the Humanities

Interests

• Reading

Connections

Nagel married Doris Blum in 1954, divorcing in 1973. In 1979 he married Anne Hollander, who died in 2014.

Father:

Walter Nagel

Mother:

Carolyn Nagel

ex-spouse:

Doris Blum

late spouse:

Anne Hollander

colleague:

Samuel Scheffler

Samuel Scheffler is an American philosopher, who is University Professor of Philosophy and Law in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at New York University.

References

• Thomas Nagel on Twitter