Thomas Nagel Biography Quotes 4 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Thomas Nagel was born on July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, then part of Yugoslavia, and emigrated to the United States as a child. He was educated at Cornell University, where he received an A.B. in 1958. At Cornell he encountered leading figures of mid-century analytic philosophy; the presence of Norman Malcolm and Max Black shaped the department's style, and John Rawls was on the faculty during Nagel's undergraduate years. Further study at the University of Oxford exposed him to the exacting standards of analytic moral philosophy, and he completed a B.Phil. before returning to the United States. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1963, with Rawls serving as a central influence on the dissertation that would evolve into his first book, The Possibility of Altruism.

Academic Career
Nagel began teaching in the early 1960s and soon joined Princeton University, where he taught for many years before moving to New York University. At Princeton he worked alongside philosophers who were reshaping analytic philosophy, including Saul Kripke and Gilbert Harman, and he participated in a broader intellectual environment connected to Donald Davidson's work in philosophy of language and mind. In 1980 Nagel moved to NYU, where he helped build what became one of the world's leading philosophy departments. There he interacted closely with colleagues such as Ronald Dworkin in law and philosophy, Samuel Scheffler in ethics and political theory, David Velleman in practical reason, and Paul Boghossian in epistemology. In later years he overlapped with David Chalmers, a central figure in contemporary philosophy of mind.

Philosophy of Mind
Nagel became widely known for the 1974 essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, which argued that conscious experience has a subjective character not captured by standard physicalist accounts. The essay did not deny the reality of the physical world but insisted that any adequate theory of mind must make sense of first-person experience. This position generated a decades-long conversation. Daniel Dennett pressed a more reductionist and computational approach to consciousness, while Sydney Shoemaker defended physicalist but nonreductive views. Joseph Levine's formulation of an "explanatory gap" and Frank Jackson's knowledge argument were often discussed in relation to Nagel's challenge. Chalmers would later develop the "hard problem of consciousness", explicitly acknowledging the importance of Nagel's perspective. The continuing debate has made the bat essay a touchstone across philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience.

Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory
Nagel's first book, The Possibility of Altruism (1970), argued that reasons for action include objective reasons to consider others, not merely prudential calculations extended over time. The book anticipated and influenced later debates about reasons and morality associated with Derek Parfit and T. M. Scanlon, even as it drew on the earlier insights of Rawls about the structure of moral justification. Nagel's essays collected in Mortal Questions (1979), including the influential Moral Luck, deepened his reputation for probing how contingency intersects with responsibility. Moral Luck was developed in parallel with Bernard Williams's work on the same theme, and the two essays became canonical points of reference for understanding how outcomes beyond one's control bear on moral assessment. In political philosophy, Nagel's Equality and Partiality (1991) examined the tensions between impartial justice and the personal standpoint, a topic that resonated with the work of Rawls and stood in productive contrast to Robert Nozick's libertarian arguments. His essay War and Massacre (1972) helped clarify the ethics of war and influenced discussions later associated with Michael Walzer's just war theory.

Objectivity, Reason, and the Limits of Reduction
A central thread in Nagel's work is the contrast between the personal and impersonal standpoints, fully presented in The View From Nowhere (1986). He argued that philosophy must acknowledge both our subjective position as individuals and the aspiration to an objective, detachable perspective; many philosophical puzzles arise from mishandling that duality. In The Last Word (1997), he defended the objectivity of reason against forms of relativism and subjectivism then gaining attention, engaging arguments associated with Richard Rorty and some naturalistic approaches that traced to W. V. O. Quine's influence. His essays on privacy, political legitimacy, and the public/private boundary showed the same care for how standpoints and reasons interact, and they often crossed paths with Ronald Dworkin's theories of rights and political morality.

Public Engagement and Institutional Leadership
Beyond his books and technical papers, Nagel has been a prominent public intellectual. He contributed regularly to The New York Review of Books, where he brought rigorous argument to a wide audience and engaged with contemporary work by philosophers and legal theorists. At NYU he was part of a collaborative intellectual community with Dworkin, Scheffler, Velleman, Boghossian, and later Chalmers, and he participated in the law school's philosophical discussions, reinforcing ties between moral philosophy and legal theory. He served on editorial boards and helped shape debates in journals devoted to ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. His professional recognition includes election to leading scholarly academies, reflecting the breadth of his influence across subfields.

Mind and Cosmos and Its Reception
In Mind and Cosmos (2012), Nagel argued that a purely materialist, neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly incomplete. He suggested that teleological principles might be needed to explain consciousness and value. The book provoked intense debate. Many scientists and philosophers criticized it, among them Steven Pinker and evolutionary biologists who defended contemporary evolutionary theory. Others, including Alvin Plantinga and some philosophers of mind, welcomed its challenge to reductionist orthodoxy even if they did not share its proposed alternatives. The controversy underscored a constant in Nagel's career: a willingness to defend the autonomy and objectivity of reason against pressures to collapse normative domains into the empirical sciences.

Teaching, Style, and Influence
Nagel is known for lucid prose, carefully developed arguments, and an ability to identify where philosophical pressure points lie. His seminars and writings have influenced multiple generations of students and scholars who went on to shape debates in ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. The list of his interlocutors reads like a map of postwar analytic philosophy: Rawls in moral and political theory; Kripke and Harman in language, mind, and ethics; Williams and Parfit on moral luck, reasons, and impartiality; Dworkin on equality and rights; Rorty and Quine as foils in discussions of objectivity; Dennett, Shoemaker, Jackson, Levine, and Chalmers in the philosophy of mind; and Walzer in the ethics of war. His role in these conversations helped set the agenda for late twentieth-century analytic philosophy and ensured that questions of value, reason, and consciousness remained tightly connected.

Legacy
Thomas Nagel's body of work forms a coherent whole: a defense of rational objectivity that respects the inescapable first-person character of experience and agency. By illuminating the friction between subjective and objective standpoints, he reshaped how philosophers think about reasons, responsibility, equality, and consciousness. His career at Princeton and NYU placed him at the center of several of the era's most consequential intellectual networks, and his exchanges with figures such as Rawls, Williams, Parfit, Dworkin, Kripke, Dennett, and Chalmers anchored discussions that continue to develop. Whether articulating the puzzle of what it is like to be a conscious creature, mapping the limits of moral control, or defending the authority of reason, Nagel gave later philosophers a set of problems and distinctions they could not ignore.

Our collection contains 4 quotes who is written by Thomas, under the main topics: Truth - Meaning of Life - Deep - Artificial Intelligence.

Other people realated to Thomas: John Rawls (Educator), Daniel Dennett (Philosopher)