Quote

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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Thomas Nagel
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 4
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Belgrade
Serbia
May
Loses
Rely
Back
Belief
Entirely
Reason
Actually
Madness
Hard
Force
Granted
Pressed
Giving
Lives
Somehow
Grip
Would
Lost
Tried
Occur
Life
Form
Taking
Collapse
World
Give
Lose
Beliefs

More quotes by Thomas Nagel

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I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.
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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.
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I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.
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Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
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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.
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Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.
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I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.
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We are an episode between two oblivions.
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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.
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There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.
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