Thomas Nagel Quotes

41 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Thomas Nagel
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.

Thomas Nagel
It isn't just that I don't believe in God.... It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

Thomas Nagel
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.

Thomas Nagel
Reason is universal because no attempted challenge to its results can avoid appealing to reason in the end-by claiming, for example, that what was presented as an argument is really a rationalization. This can undermine our confidence in the original method or practice only by giving us reasons to believe something else, so that finally we have to think about the arguments to make up our minds.

Thomas Nagel
The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future—though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.

Thomas Nagel
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.

Thomas Nagel
If sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

Thomas Nagel
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.

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

Thomas Nagel