Thomas Nagel
He asks what place the point of view can keep in a world that science describes without it: objectivity is won by moving away from the subject, and the subject was precisely what had to be explained.
American
American analytic philosopher, known for his work on subjectivity ("What is it like to be a bat?"), moral luck, and the clash between the personal and the impersonal standpoints, on death as on meaning and justice.
Justification
Nagel disputes that analysis into physical constituents can exhaust everything. How does matter produce conscious beings? A successful explanation of life and mind would have to make it intelligible that matter produces conscious beings; yet describing the parts and their interactions leaves precisely that unexplained. His anti- therefore calls for principles of another order, without his claiming to have found them. The hypothesis of a natural teleology he then advances, offering it as speculative, has been widely rejected, including by readers who share his refusal of reductionism.
The View from Nowhere (1986) · Mind and Cosmos (2012)
1 more
Justification
Nagel holds that an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and that this subjective character is tied to a point of view: this is what his stages, in 1974. Every reduction proceeds by moving away from the point of view in order to gain objectivity; applied to experience, the move removes precisely what had to be explained. From this he draws a refusal of , but not a : he maintains that we lack the necessary concepts, and that he cannot see how physicalism could be true, without declaring it false. His 1979 essay examines, without firmly endorsing it, the hypothesis of an intrinsic nature common to the mental and the physical, closer to a neutral monism than to an avowed property dualism; his 2012 book advances another conjecture, that of an oriented tendency inscribed in nature, which he himself offers as speculative.
I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat."What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4 (1974), p. 439
"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974) · "Panpsychism" (1979) · Mind and Cosmos (2012)