Thomas Nagel

An American philosopher, professor emeritus at New York University, best known for the 1974 paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, which argued that the subjective, first person character of an experience, what it is like to have it, resists explanation in the purely physical or functional terms of the natural sciences, posing what later philosophers of mind came to call the hard problem of consciousness. Nagel's The View from Nowhere (1986) extended a related concern to the difficulty of reconciling a fully objective, external conception of the world with the irreducibly subjective standpoint from which any person actually lives and reasons, and his moral and political writing, collected in Mortal Questions (1979) among other volumes, has ranged from the ethics of war to the nature of death and equality.