Thomas Nagel Quotes
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A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.
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Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.
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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.
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Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.
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Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind.
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I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.
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If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it's ridiculous t otake ourselves so seriously.
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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
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Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.
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What is it like to be a bat? What is it like for a bat to be a bat?
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If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.
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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. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.
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What we take ourselves to be doing when we think about what is the case or how we should act is something that cannot be reconciled with a reductive naturalism, for reasons distinct from those that entail the irreducibility of consciousness. It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem....Thought and reasoning are correct or incorrect in virtue of something independent of the thinker's beliefs, and even independent of the community of thinkers to which he belongs.
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Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.
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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 character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgement shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.
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Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.
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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.
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Materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants.
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Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.
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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.
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I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.
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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 kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.
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If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I woudl feel trapped.
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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 unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.