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“... that there is no ‘responsive superthou’. It’s this kind of conception of God that moves Thomas Nagel to say: ‘It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God … It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’ In Murdoch and Nagel I think ...”

“... thing as non-scientistic metaphysics, and who (if anyone) does he think practises it? Let me offer Thomas Nagel as an example of the category in question: in what way is his work in metaphysics scientistic? Putnam’s constructive proposals for what good philosophy might be like are similarly underdescribed and jejune. Wittgenstein is cited as setting a ...”

“... is famous. But Searle is not offering us a new argument: rather, an old one, recently revived by Thomas Nagel and Frank Jackson. There is also a standard, devastating reply to it which has been in the undergraduate textbooks for a decade. On the most obvious and reasonable interpretation, to say that John’s mental states are subjective in character is ...”

“... the relation between the biography of philosophers, or indeed authors in general, and their work. Thomas Nagel, for instance, has suggested that they have practically nothing to do with one another. Philosophical work is autonomous: it stands on its own feet, and interpretation of it should be based on what it contains. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, on the ...”

“... self-evident truths. As regular readers of these pages know, philosophers like Colin McGinn, Thomas Nagel and John Searle have no use for Dennett. All of them would agree that he has failed to respect ‘the brute facts of immediate conscious experience’. All of them would sympathise with Roger Penrose’s conviction, as put forward in The ...”

“... been watching his opponents closely enough. The most prominent defenders of Realism today – Thomas Nagel, T.M. Scanlon, Ronald Dworkin and Derek Parfit – explicitly deny that Realism carries the heavy metaphysical burden Kitcher is worried about. According to the Naturalist, all genuine truths correspond to states of affairs of the ...”

“... but remain inaccessible to human cognition? Here we are on well-trodden philosophical ground, with Thomas Nagel asking ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ and vindicating the incommensurability of subjective experiences, especially across species lines. Yet Chomsky has remained wedded to the humanist tradition and the search, the notion of an immortal soul ...”

“... happily. In his essays ‘Concealment and Exposure’ and ‘The Shredding of Public Privacy’, Thomas Nagel argues for the importance of a clear division between public and private spheres. He is less appalled by our constitutional doubleness than impressed by the success with which we maintain it, seeing it as a sign of our humanity. It is through ...”

“... truth that ‘all men are created equal,’ written into the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson. He and his co-signatories managed, notoriously, to square this truth with slave-ownership. The self-evidence born of vagueness tends to dissolve when the pitting of interests demands political resolution. Jefferson seems to have agonised, up to ...”

“... The Oval Window is packed with lines from a 1981 book on database systems). I once asked Thomas Nagel where I could find the line attributed to him in Not-You (1993) – ‘Love of semiconductors is not enough’ – and initially he denied having written it. When, having found the answer elsewhere, I put it to him, he was delightfully ...”

“... political power, and is the more glaring when the form that power takes is force majeure. Contra Thomas Nagel and other US liberals, leaders who can segue fluently from blowjob to prayer-breakfast should give us pause for thought. The gospelling blag takes a darker turn in ‘the new military humanism’ or, in other words, killing people as an act of ...”

“... and sometimes, in the 20th, that Continental essayistic tradition which permits a writer like Thomas Mann or Jacques Rivière to produce a kind of fattened philosophy. During the Fifties, Murdoch exchanged her Existentialism for a loosely Christian Platonism, which has been the fabric of her worldview ever since. (Her Gifford Lectures, published as ...”

“... This duality, or ambivalence, of Freud’s has not always been noticed. For example, whereas Thomas Mann saw in Freud’s ‘unmasking of happening as really doing...the innermost core of psychoanalytic theory’, T.W. Mitchell, one of Freud’s earliest British supporters, saw him as ‘dominated by the prevailing urge to find mechanistic explanations ...”

“... a sort of new-variant liberalism, has claimed a number of prominent victims, including John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, Dworkin, Bruce Ackerman, Brian Barry and even Jürgen Habermas.Surprisingly, Gray pays little attention to it, mentioning the idea only as a historical aberration. It poses problems for him, however, since it cuts across his two-face ...”

“... for which all is dark inside’? This form of question – ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ Thomas Nagel asked in a hugely influential paper in 1974 – is philosophical shorthand for asking whether a creature is conscious. Many philosophers think consciousness is an all or nothing phenomenon: you either have it or you don’t. Humans have it, as ...”