Thomas Nagel Quotes

#1. Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

Thomas Nagel

#2. 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.

Thomas Nagel

#3. If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I woudl feel trapped.

Thomas Nagel

#4. I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement ...

Thomas Nagel

#5. The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future
though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.

Thomas Nagel

#6. But it seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.

Thomas Nagel

#7. I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.

Thomas Nagel

#8. Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately therefore such beings should be comprehensible to themselves.

Thomas Nagel

#9. Every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.

Thomas Nagel

#10. I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.

Thomas Nagel

#11. 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 ...

Thomas Nagel

#12. It is not enough to be able to think that if there are logical truths, natural selection might very well have given me the capacity to recognize them. That cannot be my ground for trusting my reason, because even that thought implicitly relies on reason in a prior way.

Thomas Nagel

#13. It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.

Thomas Nagel

#14. 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.

Thomas Nagel

#15. The human will to believe is inexhaustible

Thomas Nagel

#16. Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.

Thomas Nagel

#17. The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgement that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgement shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.

Thomas Nagel

#18. Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.

Thomas Nagel

#19. The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truth of ethics and methematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.

Thomas Nagel

#20. If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.

Thomas Nagel

#21. The question is there, whther we answer it or not.

Thomas Nagel

#22. There are things that science as presently conceived does not help us to understand, and which we can see, from the internal features of physical science, that it is not going to explain. They seem to call for a more uncompromisingly mentalistic or even normative form of understanding.

Thomas Nagel

#23. If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it's ridiculous t otake ourselves so seriously.

Thomas Nagel

#24. A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.

Thomas Nagel

#25. The place at which the contrast between forms of intelligibility is most vividly presented is in the understanding of ourselves.

Thomas Nagel

#26. Materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants.

Thomas Nagel

#27. What is it like to be a bat? What is it like for a bat to be a bat?

Thomas Nagel

#28. Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism
something it is like for the organism.

Thomas Nagel

#29. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

Thomas Nagel

#30. 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.

Thomas Nagel

#31. Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.

Thomas Nagel

#32. Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.

Thomas Nagel

#33. Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.

Thomas Nagel

#34. The external view [of agency] forces itself on us at the same time that we resist it. One way this occurs is through the gradual erosion of what we do by the subtraction of what happens.

Thomas Nagel

#35. Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.

Thomas Nagel

#36. Even if life as a whole is meaningless, perhaps that's nothing to worry about. Perhaps we can recognise it and just go on as before.

Thomas Nagel

#37. Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

Thomas Nagel

#38. It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In particular, it does not matter now that in million years nothing we do now will matter.

Thomas Nagel

#39. I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My interest is in the territory between them.

Thomas Nagel

#40. I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.

Thomas Nagel

#41. Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.

Thomas Nagel

#42. Theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world. If God exists, he is not part of the natural order but a free agent not governed by natural laws. He may act partly by creating a natural order, but whatever he does directly cannot be part of that order.

Thomas Nagel

#43. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.

Thomas Nagel

#44. Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.

Thomas Nagel

#45. The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes

Thomas Nagel

#46. A theory of motivation is defective if it renders intelligible behaviour which is not intelligible.

Thomas Nagel

#47. It would be an advance if the secular theoretical establishment, and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates, could wean itself of the materialism and Darwinism of the gaps

Thomas Nagel

#48. The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle's day.

Thomas Nagel

#49. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed.

Thomas Nagel

#50. To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.

Thomas Nagel

#51. Even if we acknowledge the existence of distinct and irreducible perspectives, the wish for a unified conception of the world doesn't go away. If we can't achieve it in a form that eliminates individual perspectives, we may inquire to what extent it can be achieved if we admit them.

Thomas Nagel

#52. One of the things that drive the various reductionist programs about mind, value, and meaning, in spite of their inherent implausibility, is the lack of any comprehensive alternative.

Thomas Nagel

#53. Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside

Thomas Nagel

#54. I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.

Thomas Nagel

#55. If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

Thomas Nagel

#56. Evolutionary naturalism offers an explanation of our knowledge that is seriously inadequate, when applied to the knowledge-generating capacities that we take ourselves to have.

Thomas Nagel

#57. The most radical conclusion to draw from this would be that your mind is the only thing that exists.

Thomas Nagel