Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Thomas Nagel

Quote by Thomas Nagel

Author

Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel

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

You May Also Like

“The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”

WorldWellsFormLife IsUniverseProcessConsciousnessOur LivesParticularBecomingCreaturesWake UpSpeciesObjectivesCollectivesWakingExpansionCognitiveLengthy
Author:Thomas Nagel
Create image

“The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future--though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.”

ChoicesUniverseThreeActingConsciousnessPathCapableConsciousCrowds
Book:Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
Create image

“Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical - that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental.”

WorldFormElementsCapableAccountsCombining
Book:Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
Create image

“Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.”

HumansKindWholeUniversePrinciplesHumilityIntellectualToolsAssumingFinalsTemptationSufficientReckoningIntellectual Humility
Book:Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
Create image

“It seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.”

SeemsFacesOrderCommonProductsCurrentsCommon SenseAssumptionCosmicGoverningOrthodoxy
Book:Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
Create image

“It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.”

KnowsStoriesTogetherNaturalResultsExampleArgumentResponseAccidentsFavorsBeing TrueAlternativesExplanationAbandonChemicalsMechanismLackingProbabilitySelectionSequenceNatural SelectionCredibleSchemas
Author:Thomas Nagel
Create image