Thomas Nagel

Key ideas

In 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' (1974), Nagel argued that an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be it. A bat perceives through echolocation, and however much we learn about its brain, we cannot know what that is like from the inside. Objective science leaves out the subjective character of experience. The paper is a cornerstone of Nagel's bat and the hard problem.

His essays on death, moral luck and the absurd are classics. He defended the deprivation account of why death is bad, took up the problem of moral luck in a famous exchange with Bernard Williams, who named it, and argued that life seems absurd because we can step back and view our own serious concerns as if from outside.

The View from Nowhere generalises the theme: we can take an ever more detached view of the world, but the personal point of view never disappears, and philosophy must live with both.

Life, briefly

Nagel was born in Belgrade and moved to the United States as a child. He studied at Cornell, Oxford and Harvard, taught at Berkeley and Princeton, and joined New York University in 1980. His short introduction What Does It All Mean? is a widely used first book in philosophy.

Major works

• What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974)
• Mortal Questions (1979)
• The View from Nowhere (1986)
• What Does It All Mean? (1987)
• Mind and Cosmos (2012)

Further reading

• WikipediaThomas Nagel