unless we changed our structure. And even then‚ we would not be able to explain what is it about being a bat by being a bat ourselves. As noted by Nagel (436): ‘I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this‚ I am restricted to the resources of my own mind‚ and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present
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Through out the life and times of Thomas Nagel‚ has contributed to a wide spectrum of philosophical topics in ethical theory‚ moral psychology‚ applied ethics‚ and political theory‚ as well as to metaphysics and epistemology. According to the Platonic Myth‚ Nagel States “The thing we can do which comes closest to getting outside of ourselves is to form a detached idea of the world that includes us‚ and includes our possession of that conception as part of what it enables us to understand about
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you have just made was the best possible decision for you to make? An agent ’s relationship between responsibility and his decisions in life are affected by the alternative choices that were not taken as well as the choices that were made. Thomas Nagel believes that an agent ’s autonomy is always being threatened by the possibility of a viewpoint that is more objective than his own. His view on responsibility is such that in order to place responsibility on an agent‚ sufficient reflection about alternative
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Moral Luck Through Moral Luck‚ Nagel discusses the problem of moral luck and the conflict that arises between the common practice and intuition that most of society believes in regarding morality. Throughout his essay‚ Nagel defines intuition and the phenomenon of moral luck and claims that‚ despite having this intuition‚ people often make moral judgments about people based on factors that are beyond their control (for example‚ a drunk driver who kills a child). Nagel claims that the problem of moral
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2. Sexual bodies between nature and culture: a dualistic conception Morgan’s account filter out and problematize what he considers the most radical aspects of the analysis of Goldman and Nagel. Respectively regarding their approaches‚ in Morgan’s account sexual desire is not reduced to the unmediated bodily pleasure neither its is over-intellectualized by complex intentional and communicative inter-relation of the partners’ experiences. I argue that even if Morgan clearly gives more credit to the
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his essay‚ “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”‚ Thomas Nagel argues against reductionism through examples of human subjectivity. Thomas Nagel argues through the subjectivity of human life and uniqueness of human experiences that the reductionist mind-body problem is false or at least unknowable at this point in time. Nagel introduces the essential problem of the reductionists as an inability to grasp the meaning of consciousness in an organism. Nagel argues that “fundamentally an organism has conscious
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Nagel and Epicurus have conflicting views on whether to fear death or not. Although Nagel and Epicurus agree that life is good they have three main arguments in which their view upon death differs which are: “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”‚ “who suffers?” and asymmetry”. This paper will focus on those three reasons and explain both philosopher’s views. The first argument the philosopher’s opinion contrast in is “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”. Epicurus believes in egotistic hedonism which
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Thomas Nagel brought up the big question. Can we know what it is like to be a bat? Nagel’s question is asking can we truly know what it is like to someone or something else rather than ourselves. Is our mind limited by our experiences that we have had personally? Not everyone shares the same experiences as everybody else. If a group of people were to witness a tragedy. Every single one of them might all show the same emotion‚ but not everyone would handle that emotion the same as everyone else around
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Life Thomas Nagel is a highly intelligent and well-respected American philosopher who wrote the short (10 chapters) introduction to philosophy‚ “What does it All Mean?” While reading this intriguing brief introduction to philosophy‚ I couldn’t help but notice how Nagel discusses a variety of thought-provoking questions and theories/ideas regarding how he believes life really is and/or how it is portrayed. For instance‚ in the chapter titled‚ “How Do We Know Anything” Thomas Nagel argues that the
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The concern Nagel is bringing up early in his book is the problem of the existence of an External World. The problem simply states that the world outside of our mind does not exist and we are living in a dream from which we cannot wake up. As humans we are innately curious and that I one of the reasons that we why question the existence of an External World‚ simply because we are inquisitive beings. However there is a deeper reasoning. We take a lot of concepts from granted in our world. All of our
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