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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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Thomas Nagel
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 4
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Belgrade
Serbia
Principles
Finals
Hope
Sufficient
Universe
Assuming
Reckoning
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Humans
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Resist
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More quotes by Thomas Nagel

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There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
Thomas Nagel
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Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.
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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The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgement that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgement shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.
Thomas Nagel
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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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The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future--though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.
Thomas Nagel
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We are an episode between two oblivions.
Thomas Nagel
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The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.
Thomas Nagel
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Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.
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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Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical - that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental.
Thomas Nagel
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What is it like to be a bat? What is it like for a bat to be a bat?
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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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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Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
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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Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.
Thomas Nagel
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To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.
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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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