Co-authored letter to the APA to take a lead role in the recognition of teaching in the classroom, based on the participation in an interdisciplinary Conference on the Role of Advocacy in the Classroom back in 1995. At the time of this writing, the late Myles Brand was the President of Indiana University and a member of the IU Department of Philosophy.

This book collects Thomas Nagel's recent philosophical reflections on topics of fundamental interest: ethics, moral psychology, science and religion, death and the holocaust, and the metaphysics of mind. Among the figures discussed are Peter Singer, Alvin Plantinga, Christine Korsgaard, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, T. M. Scanlon, Ronald Dworkin, Samuel Scheffler, Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, and Daniel Dennett. Nagel consistently defends a realist interpretation of moral truth and resists reductive attempts to subsume ethics to psychology (...) and evolutionary theory. He also defends a pluralistic conception of the content of morality against utilitarianism, including deontological elements such as rights and special responsibilities. A realist outlook also informs his discussions of metaphysical and epistemological questions. The book closes with tributes to a number of people Nagel has known over the course of his career. The essays are all addressed to a general audience, and should appeal not only to philosophers but to anyone interested in current attempts to understand human life, human values, and how we fit into the world. (shrink)

Mental timing studies may be influenced by powerful cognitive illusions that can produce an asymmetry in their rate of progress relative to neuronal timing studies. Both types of timing research are also governed by a temporal asymmetry, expressed by the fact that the direction of causation must follow time's arrow. Here we refresh our earlier suggestion that the temporal asymmetry offers promise as a means of timing mental activities. We update our earlier analysis of Libet's data within this framework. Then (...) we consider the surprises which often occur on those rare occasions when neural timing experiments parallel mental timing work exactly. Together, these surprises and asymmetries prescribe a relentlessly meticulous and fully transparent exposition of timing methods, terms, and concepts which shuns plausible narratives, even when buttressed by rigorous formal models, unless guided by apposite empirical evidence. (shrink)

Some philosophers have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is no God. For Sartre and Nagel, for example, a God of the traditional classical theistic sort would constrain our powers of self-creative autonomy in ways that would severely detract from the meaning of our lives, possibly even evacuate our lives of all meaning. Some philosophers, by contrast, have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is a God. God and the Meanings of Life is (...) interested in exploring the truth in both these schools of thought, seeking to discover what God could and couldn't do to make life meaningful (as well as what he would and wouldn't do). Mawson espouses a version of the 'amalgam' or 'pluralism' thesis about the issue of life's meaning – in essence, that there are a number of different legitimate meanings of 'meaning' (and indeed 'life') in the question of life's meaning. According to Mawson, God, were he to exist, would help make life meaningful in some of these senses and hinder in some others. He argues that whilst there could be meaning in a Godless universe, there could be other sorts of meaning in a Godly one and that these would be deeper. (shrink)

Las intuiciones basadas en la perspectivade la primera persona fácilmente nospueden inducir a error sobre lo que es yno es concebible. Este punto usualmentese presenta como apoyo de posicionesreduccionistas comunes sobre el problemamente-cuerpo, pero considero que se puedeseparar de tal perspectiva. Me pareceque la fuerte apariencia de contingenciaen la relación entre el funcionamiento delorganismo físico y la mente consciente–una apariencia que depende directa oindirectamente de la perspectiva de laprimera persona– tiene que ser una ilusión.Enotraspalabras,creoquehayunaconexiónnecesariaenambasdireccionesentre lo físico y lo mental, pero (...) que nopuede descubrirse a priori. La opinión sedivide fuertemente entre la credibilidad dealgún tipo de reduccionismo funcionalista,y no examinaré mis razones para ubicarmeen el lado antireduccionista de este debate.Mi lectura del asunto es que nuestra faltade habilidad para obtener una concepcióninteligible de la relación mente-cuerpo esun signo de la inadecuación de nuestrosconceptos actuales, y que se requiere algúngrado de desarrollo.The Intuitions based on the first-personperspective can easily mislead us aboutwhat is and is not conceivable. This pointis usually made in support of familiarreductionist positions on the mind-bodyproblem, but I believe it can be detachedfrom that approach. It seems to me thatthe powerful appearance of contingency inthe relation between the functioning of thephysical organism and the conscious mind–an appearance that depends directly orindirectly on the first person– perspectivemust be an illusion. In other words, I believethatthereisanecessaryconnectioninbothdirectionsbetweenthephysicalandthemental,butthatitcannot bediscovereda priori. Opinion is strongly divided on thecredibility of some kind of functionalistreductionism, and I won’t go through myreasons for being on the antireductionistside of that debate.My reading of the situation is that ourinability to come up with an intelligibleconception of the relation between mindand body is a sign of the inadequacy of ourpresent concepts, and that some developmentis needed. (shrink)

Should the hard questions of philosophy matter to ordinary people? In this down-to-earth, nonhistorical guide, Thomas Nagel, the distinguished author of Mortal Questions and The View From Nowhere, brings philosophical problems to life, revealing in vivid, accessible prose why they have continued to fascinate and baffle thinkers across the centuries. Arguing that the best way to learn about philosophy is to tackle its problems head-on, Nagel turns to some of the most important questions we can ask about ourselves. (...) Do we really have free will? Why should we be moral? What is the relation between our minds and our brains? Is there life after death? How should we feel about death? In a universe so vast, billions of light years across, can anything we do with our lives really matter? And does it matter if it doesn't matter? These are perennial questions we ask about the human condition, and Nagel probes them, and others like them, thoughtfully, clearly, and with humor. He states his own opinions freely but with refreshing modesty, always leaving it open to readers to entertain other solutions, encouraging them to think for themselves. Nagel is eminently qualified to introduce the uninitiated to the world of philosophical inquiry. Singled out by the Chicago Literary Review as "one of the sharpest analytic philosophers in America today," he has been praised in the New York Times Book Review for writing "sensitively and elegantly" and in the Times Literary Supplement for his ability, rare among philosophers, to combine "profundity with clarity and simplicity of expression." Never rarefied, What Does It All Mean? opens our eyes to a side of the world we rarely consider, demonstrating that philosophy is no empty study but an indispensable key to understanding our lives. It challenges us to think hard and clearly, to ask questions, to try out ideas and raise possible objections to them--in short, to become philosophers ourselves. (shrink)

This paper explores the role and resolution of disagreements between physicians and their diagnostic AI-based decision support systems. With an ever-growing number of applications for these independently operating diagnostic tools, it becomes less and less clear what a physician ought to do in case their diagnosis is in faultless conflict with the results of the DSS. The consequences of such uncertainty can ultimately lead to effects detrimental to the intended purpose of such machines, e.g. by shifting the burden of proof (...) towards a physician. Thus, we require normative clarity for integrating these machines without affecting established, trusted, and relied upon workflows. In reconstructing different causes of conflicts between physicians and their AI-based tools—inspired by the approach of “meaningful human control” over autonomous systems and the challenges to resolve them—we will delineate normative conditions for “meaningful disagreements”. These incorporate the potential of DSS to take on more tasks and outline how the moral responsibility of a physician can be preserved in an increasingly automated clinical work environment. (shrink)

Although now forgotten, Paul Nagel was one of the most notorious seventeenth?century critics of orthodox Lutheranism. His Prognosticon Astrologo?Cabalisticum (1618) and Stellae Prodigiosae (1619), in which he sketched a complex astrological?prophetic system, were followed by numerous books and pamphlets over the next five years in which he predicted the arrival of the Last Judgement in 1666. Although the failure of his prophecies for 1624 led to a collapse of interest in his prognostications, he turns out to have been a (...) key figure in early seventeenth?century Protestantism. How he strayed from his original orthodox position is the subject of this essay. (shrink)

Using the Epicurean position on death as a starting point, this article re-examines the basic assumptions of philosophers regarding their views on whether death should be seen as a bad. It questions the positions of philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit by applying Wittgenstein’s notion of grammar as developed by G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker. While philosophers may characterize questions such as ‘What is the nature of death?’ and ‘Is death a bad?’ as metaphysical, (...) I propose that such questions can be better characterized as grammatical. The failure to understand the grammatical character of such questions creates the illusion that questions concerning the nature of death can be adequately tackled with reference to empirical or metaphysical ‘facts’. If the arguments in this article are substantiated, some philosophical puzzles about death can be dissolved. (shrink)

Living kidney donation provides a promising opportunity in situations where the scarcity of cadaveric kidneys is widely acknowledged. While many patients and their relatives are willing to accept its benefits, others are concerned about living kidney programs; they appear to feel pressured into accepting living kidney transplantations as the only proper option for them. As we studied the attitudes and views of patients and their relatives, we considered just how actively health care professionals should encourage living donation. We argue that (...) active interference in peoples’ personal lives is justified - if not obligatory. First, we address the ambiguous ideals of non-directivity and value neutrality in counselling. We describe the main pitfalls implied in these concepts, and conclude that these concepts cannot account for the complex reality of living donation and transplantation. We depict what is required instead as truthful information and context-relative counselling. We then consider professional interference into personal belief systems. We argue that individual convictions are not necessarily strong, stable, or deep. They may be flawed in many ways. In order to justify interference in peoples’ personal lives, it is crucial to understand the structure of these convictions. Evidence suggests that both patients and their relatives have attitudes towards living kidney donation that are often open to change and, accordingly, can be influenced. We show how ethical theories can account for this reality and can help us to discern between justified and unjustified interference. We refer to Stephen Toulmin’s model of the structure of logical argument, the Rawlsian model of reflective equilibrium, and Thomas Nagel’s representation of the particularistic position. (shrink)

Eddington, A. The decline of determinism.--Heisenberg, W. and others. Dialogue concerning science and philosophical positions.--Sinnott, E. Biology and freedom.--Nuttin, J. The unconscious and freedom.--Nagel, E. Determinism in history.--Ayer, A. J. Freedom and necessity.--Campbell, C. A. Philosophical defence of freedom.--Hare, R. M. Freedom and reason.--Dewey, J. Freedom as a problem.--Sartre, J.-P. Freedom and total responsibility.--Camus, A. Freedom and rebellion.--Rand, A. Freedom and individualism.--Thévenaz, P. Freedom and action.--Luijpen, W. A. Phenomenology of freedom.--Teilhard de Chardin, P. Cosmic freedom.--Jaspers, K. Freedom and society.--Macmurray, (...) J. Freedom in the personal nexus.--Brunner, A. Incarnation of freedom.--Ricoeur, P. Freedom as human creativity.--Finance, J. de. Freedom and existence.--Bibliography (p. 243-251). (shrink)

Schlagel begins with the claim: "Ever since Galileo, our beliefs about the world have been influenced, in the main, by the results of scientific inquiry." This is still true, he says, in a sense: "Prominent contemporary philosophers such as Popper, Nagel, Hempel, Grünbaum, Toulmin, and Feyerabend have also taken scientific developments as their main focus of interest." But Schlagel thinks analytical philosophers, by contrast with philosophers of earlier periods, are peculiarly academic--out of touch with the general contemporary intellectual community. (...) Though writing for academic philosophers, Schlagel wants to reach a "wider audience comprised of scholars of diverse backgrounds." To achieve this aim, he says he will diverge from the current analytical paradigm in the following three respects: " [The book] does not focus on language as the primary datum for philosophical investigation, but the results of empirical inquiry...; it does not rely on logic as the tool for clarifying concepts and arguments; and it is systematic, in that it attempts to show that the various facets of the problem of knowledge... are interrelated and imply a new framework of interpretation". (shrink)

In "What is it Like to be a Bat?" Thomas Nagel argues that we cannot imagine what it is like to be a bat or presently understand how physicalism might be true. Both arguments have been seriously misunderstood. I defend them against various objections, point out a problem with the argument against physicalism, and show how the problem can be solved.

Nagel has argued that the ‘mind-body’ problem, as traditionally conceived, is insoluble. His challenge to philosophers is to devise a metaphysical scheme that incorporates materialist concepts in describing first person experience and mentalistic concepts in describing third person experience, such that the internal relations between the concepts thereby constructed are necessary. Nagel's own suggestion, a scheme not unlike the ‘underlying process’ schemes of the physical sciences, seems to lead him towards a covert materialism. Progress can be made in (...) meeting the challenge by tackling the problem first by taking the units in each ‘sphere’ to be brains and persons. I show that a metaphysics based on the metaphor of person defined tasks and materially defined tools does satisfy both Nagel's challenge conditions. To devise a scheme for qualia and brain-states I turn back to Locke's presentation of the primary/secondary quality distinction. This depends on the concept of a causal power, grounded in material states of the world. While this scheme is inadequate, a variation, based on Gibson's concept of an affordance, and drawing on Bohr's resolution of the seeming incompatibility between wave and particle ontologies for physics, is promising. The world, whatever it is, affords material states to our perceptual apparatus, and mental states to our proprioceptual apparatus. The mental states/brain states duality is not a duality of types of states, which might stand in causal relations to one another, but is a duality of means of access to two classes of affordances of whatever the world is. There is no mind-body problem in the traditional sense, namely ‘How could a material state cause or be caused by a mental state?’. (shrink)

One of Thomas Nagel’s premises in his argument for panpsychism is criticized. The principal criticisms are: Nagel has failed to provide a clear sense in which mental properties are nonphysical. Even within the framework of Nagel’s argumeent, there is no strong reason to think that the psychological lies outside the explanatory web of physical properties. This is because certain reducing properties common to both the psychological and nonpsychological may well be physical.

This paper is an attempt to understand and assess Thomas Nagel's influential case against physicalism in the philosophy of mind. I show that Nagel has claimed that experience is "subjective", or "essentially connected with a single point of view" in at least three different senses: first, in the sense that it is essential to every experience that there be something it is like to have it; second, in the sense that what an experience is like for its possessor (...) cannot be understood by a radically different type of organism; and third, in the sense that an experience cannot be "apprehended" or "observed" from a third-person perspective. I also show that these three claims have entered into two different arguments for his view that experience cannot be accounted for in physicalist terms. By way of assessment, I suggest that physicalists have decent resources for responding to the second and third of Nagel's claims about the subjectivity of experience, but that they currently have less convincing things to say about the first claim. (shrink)

Thomas Nagel argues that the subjective character of mind inevitably eludes philosophical efforts to incorporate the mental into a single, complete, physically objective view of the world. Nagel sees contemporary philosophy as caught on the horns of a dilemma.

This paper criticizes an influential argument from Thomas Nagel’s THE POSSIBILTIY OF ALTRUISM, an argument that plays a foundational role in the philosophies of (at least) Philippa Foot, John McDowell and Jonathan Dancy. Nagel purports to prove that a person can be can be motivated to perform X by the belief that X is likely to bring about Y, without a causally active or biffy desire for Y. If Cullity and Gaut are to be believed (ETHICS AND PRACTICAL (...) REASONING) this is widely regarded within the practical reasoning industry as an established fact. My thesis is a simple one. Nagel’s argument is an abject failure and the philosophies that are founded on it are built upon sand. There is a little bit of rather amateurish X-Phi at the end, but I don’t want readers to get too excited about this as it is essentially icing on the cake. This paper is not primarily an exercise in Experimental Philosophy but in Baby Logic, and it’s central thesis is a logical one, namely that Nagel (to put the point politely) fails to prove his thesis. (shrink)

The strong intuition that the facts concerning the subjectivity of consciousness are simply beyond the grasp of objective science is the highest barrier to an intuitively convincing materialism in the philosophy of mind. We are steeped in a tradition which has it that there is, to state it from the first-person point of view, an epistemic difference in principle between my introspectible experience, which only I can apprehend and know, and the things which everyone can apprehend and which form the (...) domain of the natural sciences. This contrast is sometimes cast as that between the subjective stuff of first-person introspectible consciousness and the objective stuff of the natural sciences. In this essay, I will try to budge the view of the subjective-objective distinction which underlies this tradition from its position as tacit dogma. (shrink)

The key test cases for deciding between my brand of contextualism and Jennifer Nagel’s brand of invariantism are the third-person examples. As matters currently stand, first-person cases, like my original Bank cases (pp. 1-2), are pretty useless here. Nagel can agree that the speaker’s claim to “know” in Case A and his admission that he doesn’t “know” in Case B are both true; she just accepts a different account of why it is that both assertions can be, and (...) are, true, according to which it is because in B the speaker doesn’t meet the attitude requirement for knowledge, while he does meet that requirement in A. Perhaps not at all unexpectedly, I find my proposed explanation more plausible; presumably, Nagel sees things differently. We can try to hash this out, but extremely tricky questions, and no stable enough answers, about how to understand the attitude needed for knowledge derail this attempt to decide between accounts. But no worries: Without having to first decide these issues, third-person cases provide the natural test cases to decide between the views. We can use them to decide between theories, and then go back to the first-person cases and apply what we’ve learned from the third-person cases to guide our handling of the trickier firstperson cases. (shrink)