Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994
Nagel (Thomas)
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Inside Cover Blurb

  1. Thomas Nagel is one of the most visible, outspoken and engaged contemporary philosophers; the Times Literary Supplement has called him "the most interesting philosopher of our day." Over the past1 twenty-five years, Nagel has been a central figure in the public dialogue on subjectivity and consciousness, objectivity and ethics, liberalism and reason. Writing for a wide range of popular, academic, and legal publications, he has participated in an exhilarating exchange of ideas, and has helped bring contemporary issues in contact with philosophical tradition.
  2. Other Minds gathers Nagel's most important critical essays and reviews on the philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. The pieces here discuss philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, as well as contemporary legal and political theorists like Robert Nozick and Ronald Dworkin. Also included are essays tracing Nagel's ongoing participation in debates surrounding the mind-body problem — lucid, opinionated responses to Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and others. Running through Other Minds is Nagel's overriding conviction that the most compelling intellectual issues of our day — from the scientific foundations of Freudian theory to the vicissitudes of judicial interpretation — are essentially philosophical problems. Vital, accessible, and controversial, these writings represent the best of one of our leading thinkers.


In-Page Footnotes ("Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994")

Footnote 1: As of 1995.

Book Comment

Oxford University Press; 1995. Nice Hardback edition.


"Nagel (Thomas) - Aristotle on Eudaimonia"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - Armstrong on the Mind"

Source: Block - Readings in Philosophy of Psychology - Vol 1

Paper Comment

Also in "Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994".


"Nagel (Thomas) - Chomsky: Linguistics and Epistemology"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - Dennett: Consciousness Dissolved"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - Dennett: Content and Consciousness"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994

Paper Comment

Review of "Dennett (Daniel) - Content and Consciousness: An Analysis of Mental Phenomena".


"Nagel (Thomas) - Dworkin: Interpretation and the Law"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - Fodor: The Boundaries of Inner Space"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - Freud's Anthropomorphism"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - Freud's Permanent Revolution"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - Hare: Moral Thinking"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - Hare: The Foundations of Impartiality"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - Kolakowski: Modernity and the Devil"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - MacIntyre versus the Enlightenment"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994

Paper Comment

Whose Justice? Which Rationality?


"Nagel (Thomas) - Nozick: Libertarianism without Foundations"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994

Paper Comment

Anarchy, State and Utopia


"Nagel (Thomas) - O'Shaughnessy: The Will"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - Rawls on Justice"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - Schelling: Personal Identity and Self-Command"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


"Nagel (Thomas) - Schelling: The Price of Life"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994

Paper Comment

Choice and Consequence


"Nagel (Thomas) - Searle: Why We Are Not Computers"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994


Author’s Abstract & Introduction
  1. This was a review of "Searle (John) - The Rediscovery of the Mind" (1992). Though Searle and I agree about a great deal, I don’t think it's possible to distinguish his anti-reductionist solution from property dualism. And I do not believe it could be a brute fact of nature that the higher order mental properties of the nervous system should be produced by the details of its physico-chemical operation. The relation between the levels must be more "internal" than that – a form of intelligibly necessary consequence rather than pure correlation. The irreducibility of the ontologically subjective to the ontologically objective continues to be an obstacle to the imaginability of such a connection.
  2. According to a widely held view, the brain is a giant computer and the relation of the human mind to the human brain is like that of a computer program to the electronic hardware on which it runs. The philosopher John Searle, a dragon-slayer by temperament, has set out to show that this claim, together with the materialist tradition underlying it, is nonsense, for reasons some of which are obvious and some more subtle. Elaborating arguments that he and others have made over the past twenty years, he attacks most of the cognitive science establishment and then offers a theory of his own about the nature of mind and its relation to the physical world. If this pungent book is right, the computer model of the mind is not just doubtful or imperfect, but totally and glaringly absurd.
  3. His main reasons are two.
    1. First, the essence of the mind is consciousness: all mental phenomena are either actually or potentially conscious. And none of the familiar materialist analyses of mind can deal with conscious experience: they leave it out, either by not talking about it or by identifying it with something else that has nothing to do with consciousness.
    2. Second, computers that do not have minds can be described as running programs, processing information, manipulating symbols, answering questions, and so on only because they are so constructed that people, who do have minds, can interpret their physical operations in those ways. To ascribe a computer program to the brain implies a mind that can interpret what the brain does, so the idea of explaining the mind in terms of such a program is incoherent.

Paper Comment

Review of "Searle (John) - The Rediscovery of the Mind".


"Nagel (Thomas) - Williams: One Thought Too Many"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994

Paper Comment

Moral Luck


"Nagel (Thomas) - Williams: Resisting Ethical Theory"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994

Paper Comment

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy


"Nagel (Thomas) - Wittgenstein: The Egocentric Predicament"

Source: Nagel (Thomas) - Other Minds - Critical Essays 1969 - 1994

Paper Comment

Review of David Pears "The False Prison, Vol.2"


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