Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher who has made influential contributions to philosophy of mind and ethics. His essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? is a classic argument that subjective consciousness cannot be reduced to objective physical description.

Nagel's philosophical project centres on the tension between the subjective and objective standpoints: no purely objective account of the world can capture what it is like to be a particular experiencing subject. His Moral Questions and The View from Nowhere apply this tension to ethics, political philosophy, and the nature of rational explanation.