Category: Nagel, Thomas
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Peter Singer Reviews Thomas Nagel’s, Circling the Good
Here. (HT: the ever-helpful Dave Lull)
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A Design Argument from the Cognitive Reliability of Our Senses: A Proof of Classical Theism?
Substack latest. I present an argument that many will take as supporting classical theism. But I point out that, so taken, the argument is not rationally inescapable or philosophically dispositive since it may also be construed along Nagelian lines to support an inherent immanent teleology in nature. Topics include rationality, intentionality, both intrinsic and…
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A Design Argument From the Cognitive Reliability of Our Senses: A Proof of Classical Theism?
You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes. Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles…
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Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos
An overview. Substack latest.
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Nagel on Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion
Substack latest.
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Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem
Substack latest.
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Must God Become Man to Know the Human Lot?
Vito Caiati, commenting on Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron: In yesterday’s Good Friday post, you write, “The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death. For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he…
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From the Archives: Eight Years Ago Today
David Gordon Reviews Thomas Nagel's New Book and Criticizes Brian Leiter's Puerile Fulminations David Gordon reviews Thomas Nagel's Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002–2008. The following is a particularly interesting portion of the review in which Gordon comments on a certain status-obsessed careerist's puerile fulminations against a real philosopher: Read it all.
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Conscious Experience: A Hard Nut to Crack
This is an addendum to Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem. In that entry I set forth a problem in the philosophy of mind, pouring it into the mold of an aporetic triad: 1) Conscious experience is not an illusion. 2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.…
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Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem
Nagel replies in the pages of NYRB (8 June 2017; HT: Dave Lull) to one Roy Black, a professor of bioengineering: The mind-body problem that exercises both Daniel Dennett and me is a problem about what experience is, not how it is caused. The difficulty is that conscious experience has an essentially subjective character—what it…
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Nagel on Dennett: Is Consciousness an Illusion?
A NYRB review. (HT: the enormously helpful Dave Lull) To put it bluntly and polemically: Thomas Nagel is the real thing as philosophers go; Daniel Dennett is a sophist. My Nagel category; my Dennett category. Killer Quote: I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying…
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Keith Burgess-Jackson on Thomas Nagel
This is worth reproducing; I came to essentially the same conclusion (emphasis added): The viciousness with which this book [Mind and Cosmos] was received is, quite frankly, astonishing. I can understand why scientists don't like it; they're wary of philosophers trespassing on their terrain. But philosophers? What is philosophy except (1) the careful analysis of…
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Anderson on Nagel
Interest in Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos continues unabated. James N. Anderson weighs in here. I thank James for his linkage to my series of Nagel posts.
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Good Reads
Roger Kimball, Racism, Inc. Victor Davis Hanson, The Decline of College; The Late, Great Middle Class Leon Wieseltier, Crimes Against Humanities Edward Feser, Man is Wolff to Man. I was going to write this post, but Ed beat me to it. Ed beats down the superannuated Wolff for boarding the bandwagon of benighted bashers of…
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Thomas Nagel on the Central Argument of His Mind and Cosmos
Here. Excerpt: This means that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a different type from any we have seen…