Thomas Nagel Quotes

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

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

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

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

What is it like to be a bat? What is it like for a bat to be a bat?

Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.

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

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

We are an episode between two oblivions.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and naturally, hope there is no God. I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The human will to believe is inexhaustible