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A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.

Thomas Nagel

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Thomas Nagel
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 4
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Belgrade
Serbia
Persons
Psychology
Ungenerous
Person
Behave
Monumental
Vain
Conceited
Ethics
Unkind
Cold
Envious
Moral
Cowardly
Action
Greedy
May
Perfectly

More quotes by Thomas Nagel

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Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.
Thomas Nagel
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If sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.
Thomas Nagel
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Altruism itself depends on a recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.
Thomas Nagel
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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.
Thomas Nagel
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Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.
Thomas Nagel
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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.
Thomas Nagel
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If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I woudl feel trapped.
Thomas Nagel
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If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse - a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.
Thomas Nagel
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We are an episode between two oblivions.
Thomas Nagel
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Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.
Thomas Nagel
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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.
Thomas Nagel
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I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, I hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God I don't want the universe to be like that.
Thomas Nagel
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Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.
Thomas Nagel
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Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
Thomas Nagel
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I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.
Thomas Nagel
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I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.
Thomas Nagel
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fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.
Thomas Nagel
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every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.
Thomas Nagel
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If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.
Thomas Nagel
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Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.
Thomas Nagel