Analytic & pragmatist · born 1937 · living
Thomas Nagel
NYU philosopher who asked what it is like to be a bat
An organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be it; this subjective point of view cannot be captured by any objective, physical description, the “view from nowhere”.
Life and thought
Thomas Nagel (born 1937 in Belgrade) grew up in the United States, studied at Cornell and at Oxford, and wrote his doctorate at Harvard under John Rawls. After teaching at Berkeley and Princeton he moved in 1980 to New York University, where he became University Professor. He writes in a clear, unspecialised style, and his short book What Does It All Mean? (1987) is a classic introduction to philosophy.
In “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) Nagel points out that bats perceive the world by echolocation. We could learn every physical fact about a bat’s brain and still not know what it is like, for the bat, to experience the world that way. Experience is tied to a point of view, and physical science works by abstracting from points of view, so it leaves something out. The tension between the subjective and the objective, the “view from nowhere”, runs through his work on ethics, free will and the meaning of life. In Mind and Cosmos (2012) he argued that materialist neo-Darwinism cannot explain consciousness, a claim many scientists rejected.
Works
Teachers
1921–2002John RawlsRawls supervised Nagel’s doctoral thesis at Harvard.Shaped
born 1966David ChalmersAustralian philosopher who named the “hard problem” of consciousnessArgued against
1926–2016Hilary Putnam“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” argues that reductive theories of mind, functionalism included, leave out the subjective point of view.Meanwhile, in other traditions
1925–1995Gilles DeleuzeFrench philosopher of difference, desire and becoming1926–1984Michel FoucaultFrench historian of madness, prisons and sexuality1929–2026Jürgen HabermasLeading second-generation Frankfurt theorist of democracy and communication1930–2004Jacques DerridaAlgerian-born French philosopher who founded deconstruction1935–2003Edward SaidPalestinian-American literary critic at Columbia Universityborn 1942Gayatri Chakravorty SpivakIndian-born theorist and translator of Derrida, at Columbia UniversityOn the record
Thomas Nagel is living; he studied at Oxford as well as Harvard, and Rawls supervised his doctorate.
Nagel, born in Belgrade on 4 July 1937, took a BA at Cornell (1958), a BPhil at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1960), and a Harvard PhD (1963) supervised by John Rawls. No report of his death was found as of October 2026. His Oxford years overlapped with Austin’s, but no teaching relationship is documented, so no tie is drawn.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Thomas Nagel”