Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel's contribution to philosophy over the past forty years has been enormously influential. In the first sustained examination of Nagel's ideas, Alan Thomas provides a detailed exploration and interpretation of Nagel's work in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of the mind, ethics, and political philosophy. He offers an astute and extended commentary that gives insight into Nagel's overall position and contributions to occasional debates, combined with a discussion of other philosophers with whom Nagel has engaged over the course of his career. Thomas's main interpretive claim is that Nagel develops two different ways of understanding what it is to think objectively about a subject matter in a way that forces philosophers to recognise the phenomenon of the radically perspectival. Some ways of thinking and speaking, notably about the mind, have to be interpreted as being ineliminably from a particular point of view. Thomas begins by clarifying and defending Nagel's basic metaphysical contrast between subjective and objective ways of thinking about the world and shows how a proper understanding of radically perspectival views of the world allows one to defend some of Nagel's most important claims in philosophy. Nagel's work in the philosophy of mind is traced from his early paper on physicalism to his recent defence of a form of dual aspect theory. Thomas then turns to ethics, where Nagel's influence is pre-eminent, and traces the development of Nagel's views from his contrast between subjective and objective reasons in his early work to his later hybrid ethical theory. The volume concludes with an examination of Nagel's political philosophy, particularly his recent controversial work on global justice. Book jacket.