88 Quotes by Thomas Nagel

Common sense doesn’t have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.

To deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of cognitive dissonance.

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.

I’m not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.

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.

If you can’t prove that anything exists outside you own mind, is it all right to go on believing in the external world anyway?

Whatever one may think about the possibility of a designer, the prevailing doctrine – that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law – cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis.

The most radical conclusion to draw from this would be that your mind is the only thing that exists.

It would be an advance if the secular theoretical establishment, and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates, could wean itself of the materialism and Darwinism of the gaps.