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Quote by Thomas Nagel

“A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.”

Quote by Thomas Nagel

Book:Mortal Questions

Work

Mortal Questions

A collection of essays exploring profound questions about life, death, and the meaning of existence. more

Author

Thomas Nagel, born on July 4, 1937, is an American philosopher renowned for his contributions to moral philosophy, political philosophy, and epistemology. His works delve into themes such as free will, moral intuition, objectivity, philosophy of mind, and religion. more

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“The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgement that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgement shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.”

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Book:Mortal Questions

Source: Mortal Questions

“Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.”

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Book:Mortal Questions : Canto

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“Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.”

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“The external view [of agency] forces itself on us at the same time that we resist it. One way this occurs is through the gradual erosion of what we do by the subtraction of what happens.”

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Book:Mortal Questions : Canto

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“What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arms goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?”

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Author:Ludwig Wittgenstein

“...once the cards are dealt we turn them up in turn, and make two piles each, one red, one black; the winner has the biggest pile of red ones. So once the cards are dealt the game is determined, and from any position in it you can derive all others back to the deal and forward to win or draw. ...in relation to the solar system..., the laws are like the rules of an infantile card game.... But in relation to what happens on and inside a planet the laws are, rather, like the rules of chess; the play is seldom determined, though nobody breaks the rules.”

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Author:G. E. M. Anscombe

“Those emotive theorists who said that the function of moral utterance was to evince emotion would... have been correct if they had substituted the indefinite for the definite article.”

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Author:Alasdair MacIntyre

“[S]uppose the mind of [a] friend of humanity were clouded over with his own grief, extinguishing all sympathetic participation in the fate of others; he still has the resources to be beneficent to those suffering distress, but the distress of others does not touch him because he is sufficiently busy with his own; and now, where no inclination any longer stimulates him to it, he tears himself out of his deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, solely from duty.”

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Author:Immanuel Kant

“Normativity, I believe, is very different from motivating force. Neither includes, or implies, the other. Other animals can be motivated by their desires and beliefs. Only we can understand and respond to reasons.”

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Author:Derek Parfit