Philosophy 101 March 2‚ 2014 Thomas Nagel‚ Free Will 1. When you choose to act one way rather than another‚ you were free to have acted differently. 2. You could have done otherwise if you had wanted to do so. 3. Your choices are not predetermined in advance. 4. Determinism must be false. 5. Therefore‚ we have free will over the choices we make in our life. One case Thomas Nagel presents about free will is shown using a cake and peach example. He starts it off by saying that you are
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hat do we actually know? Am I just in my own world? Are the people I’m seeing a figment of my imagination or are they real? In this chapter‚ Thomas Nagel talks about the perception of reality‚ “How do you know anything?”. How can we be sure that what we are seeing is reality? Each person has a different view on whether or not this is possible. As human beings we have the tendency to question things based on ours senses‚ these are called our subjective experiences. We are able to see‚ touch‚ hear
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Section I Thomas Nagel’s Death explores the debate concerning the nature of death itself: is death a bad thing? Nagel explores this question by formulating 2 distinct hypotheses. The first of these is the postion that death deprives us of life‚ which is the only thing (or state) we have‚ which would make death a certain evil. The other position holds that death is merely the cessation of all awareness and‚ consequently‚ existence. Nagel discusses the conditions of position one‚ saying that life
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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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suffering‚ thereby maximizing net pleasure (pleasure minus suffering). Thomas Nagel‚ in his book Mortal Questions‚ disagrees with this viewpoint entirely saying that there is more to harm than just suffering‚ more to pleasure than momentary comfort‚ and more to death than an end to an existence. According to the hedonist‚ to be harmed you must suffer‚ that is‚ you must consciously experience a discomfort. According to Nagel‚ harm does not equal suffering. Certainly suffering is a type of harm but
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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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Thomas Nagel’s View on 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
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Does free will exist? Its our destiny predetermines? Do we have a choice? Did we ever have a choice? According to Thomas nagel on his book “what does it all mean?” There is a specific chapter dedicated to “Free will” in which nagel himself lays out a situation about the choice of a peach and a chocolate cake piece. He’s describing the situation and the dilemma between both choices. despite the fact that you thought you had a choice‚ that you could have the peach if you want but you made the decision
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the faces of their captors after just one capture. Thomas Nagel looked into the phenomenology of animals as well‚ more specifically‚ into that of bats. He believed that “the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat” (Nagel‚ 1974). What he is saying here is that for an animal to have consciousness‚ they should have the ability to see the world and experience it as no other could. Nagel goes on to say that “if the facts of experience‚ facts
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In 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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