Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagelis an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University in the NYU Department of Philosophy, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics...
NationalityYugoslavian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth4 July 1937
real psychology special
equally real at all stages of his life; specifically, the fact that a particular stage is present cannot be regarded as conferring on it any special status.
reality views world
The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.
real goal ridiculous
If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it's ridiculous t otake ourselves so seriously.
reality admitting tendencies
There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
taken mean reality
Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind.
reality empathy recognition
Altruism itself depends on a recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.
cable few learning moving release soon start toward
We will soon start moving toward a release mindset. That's new for the cable industry. There'll be a new release every few months. This will be a learning process.
cable cell consumers create features home leverage media operators outside phone pushing services sprint whatever
We don't think of this as cable operators pushing a cell phone service. We want to leverage what Sprint has outside the home and create services and features so that consumers can take whatever media they have with them.
days involved joint progress surprised venture
I'm actually surprised how well we've done. We've made more progress in the first 100 days of this one than any other joint venture I've been involved in.
successful understanding mind
If a psychological Maxwell devises a general theory of mind, he may make it possible for a psychological Einstein to follow with a theory that the mental and the physical are really the same. But this could happen only at the end of a process which began with the recognition that the mental is something completely different from the physical world as we have come to know it through a certain highly successful form of detached objective understanding. Only if the uniqueness of the mental is recognized will concepts and theories be devised especially for the purpose of understanding it.
want deals ifs
If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.
believe want there-is-no-god
It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and naturally, hope there is no God. I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.
occupation life-is intense
Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.
elements world form
Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical--that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental....