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Title: The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel ISBN: 0-19-505644-2 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: January, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.56 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A refusal to see things one way
Comment: This book is incredibly important as a corrective to much recent academic philosophy.
What some reviewers have dismissed as "shallow" or "New Age puffery" or "not rigorous" is Nagel's refusal to give up the importance of some basic stances we adopt towards our minds, our actions, and the world.
For example, Nagel believes that a philosopher concerned with establishing the fullest kind of objective understanding of reality possible needs to make sense of how (a) our scientific view of the world can be brought into harmony with (b)the way things look from inside our subjective consciousness or experience of the world. The strategy he is arguing against is the attempt to reduce (b)to the facts of (a) and then call it establishing objectivity. In other words, there is another level of explanation, other than scientific reduction, that philosophers need to be engaged in order to make a completely objective view of the world coherent--that is, a view that does not leave crucial things what it feels like to be human from the inside.
Rating: 1
Summary: ... this is bad
Comment: nagel is perhaps the least rigorous philosopher in the past 50 years. he has an obvious smugness that he is somehow above contemporary debates in philosophy and therefore chooses not to engage them directly. maybe posterity will discover nagel's genius, but for now if you read this book surrounded by its peers and rivals (particularly Quine, Dennett, Block, and all those wicked scientificalist/physicalist silly gooses) then you really should come away wondering what he's talking about.
admittedly, nagel angers me on a somewhat personal level. it seems as though since jack smart and david armstrong came along with overtly physical theories of mind, that philosophers of mind have been working to make sense of explanatory gaps, hard problems of consciousness, etc. And much of this work is very interesting and makes significant progress. But then Nagel comes along, calls everyone stupid and yells, "WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?". Then he fills it in with some mucky muck and unknowing philosophy students take him seriously...
Rating: 5
Summary: Don't be 'Confuzed'
Comment: Please don't be confused by an earlier post (which, thankfully, no one seems to have taken seriously) stating that there is some confusion in Nagel's own ideas about the possibility of objective knowledge. Nagel is a smart man, and it is not surprising that the subtleties of his arguments may be lost on some. He says it doesn't look like we can ever gain objective knowledge, basically, because we simply _are_ all our personality traits etc. that all go into determining how we see the world. His arguments about free will are very good and strangely overlooked. This is quite simply one of the best books on philosophy I have ever read, despite the fact that I agree with almost none of it; well composed, well thought-out, and well argued.
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Title: What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy by Thomas Nagel ISBN: 0195052161 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: December, 1987 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Possibility of Altruism by Thomas Nagel ISBN: 0691020027 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 March, 1979 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Last Word by Thomas Nagel ISBN: 0195149831 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: October, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel ISBN: 0521406765 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 02 May, 1991 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Other Minds: Critical Essays 1969-1994 by Thomas Nagel ISBN: 0195132467 Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr on Demand Pub. Date: June, 1999 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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