Thomas Nagel Quotes

42 quotes in 666 categories

• Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.
• Reason is universal because no attempted challenge to its results can avoid appealing to reason in the end-by claiming, for example, that what was presented…
• I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.
• 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…
• 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…
• A theory of motivation is defective if it renders intelligible behaviour which is not intelligible.
• A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
• 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…
• 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…
• I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.
• The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form…
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

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