Thomas Nagel (; born July 4, 1937) is an American postanalytic philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy, a professor of law, and University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University. From 2001 to 2003, he was the Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. His main areas of philosophical interest are political philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of mind. After earning his doctorate from Harvard University under John Rawls, Nagel was a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1963 to 1966 and a professor at Princeton University from 1966 to 1980. In 1967, he and Robert Nozick co-founded an influential group of philosophers known as the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy. In the 1970s, Nagel also co-founded the philosophy journal Philosophy & Public Affairs. Nagel is known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings. He continued the critique of reductionism in Mind and Cosmos (2012), in which he argues against the neo-Darwinian view of the emergence of consciousness.
Early life and education
Nagel was born on July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. His parents, Carolyn (née Baer) and Walter Nagel, were German Jewish refugees. He arrived in the U.S. in 1939 and was raised secular in New York City, but identifies as Jewish. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944. Nagel graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy in 1958. As an undergraduate, he studied under the philosophers Norman Malcolm, Rogers Albritton, and John Rawls. He initially intended to major in physics, but, after developing an interest in philosophy, switched. After graduation, he won a Fulbright Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Philosophy from Corpus Christi College in 1960. There he studied under Paul Grice, Peter Strawson, H. L. A. Hart, G. E. M. Anscombe, G. E. L. Owen, Philippa Foot, and James Thomson. He was also one of the last students of J. L. Austin, who served as the advisor of his BPhil thesis. In 1963, Nagel earned his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University, where he completed his dissertation under Rawls, who had moved from Cornell to Harvard. His professors at Harvard also included Willard Van Orman Quine and Noam Chomsky. He later called Rawls "the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century." As a doctoral student at Harvard, Nagel edited early drafts of Rawls's A Theory of Justice and befriended Gilbert Harman and Saul Kripke. His doctoral thesis was titled "Altruism".
Academic career Nagel taught at the University of California, Berkeley (from 1963 to 1966) and at Princeton University (from 1966 to 1980), where he trained many well-known philosophers, including Susan Wolf, Shelly Kagan, and Samuel Scheffler, the last of whom is now his colleague at New York University. Nagel is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and in 2006 was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. On October 9, 2017, he was elected as a corresponding fellow of the French Académie des sciences morales et politiques. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2008 he was awarded a Rolf Schock Prize for his work in philosophy, the Balzan Prize, and the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Oxford.
Philosophical work
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