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Thomas Nagel
History & Commentary
American postanalytic philosopher and NYU professor, Thomas Nagel is known for critiques of materialist accounts of mind and contributions to political philosophy and ethics.
Biography
Thomas Nagel is an American postanalytic philosopher and University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University. He earned his doctorate from Harvard University under John Rawls and served on the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley (1963–1966) and Princeton University (1966–1980). From 2001 to 2003 he was the Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.
Nagel’s main areas of interest are political philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. In 1967 he and Robert Nozick co-founded the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy, and in the 1970s he co-founded the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs. He is widely cited for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, notably in essays and books addressing consciousness and moral theory.
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Books by Thomas Nagel
Mind and cosmos
In Mind and Cosmos (2012) Nagel argues that modern materialist approaches fail to explain consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value, and that the neo‑Darwinian account of the emergence of mind is incomplete; he suggests openness to non‑mechanistic, perhaps teleological, principles without endorsing any definite alternative.