About Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel (; born July 4, 1937) is an American postanalytic philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy, a professor of law, and University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University. From 2001 to 2003, he was the Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. His main areas of philosophical interest are political philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of mind. After earning his doctorate from Harvard University under John Rawls, Nagel was a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1963 to 1966 and a professor at Princeton University from 1966 to 1980. In 1967, he and Robert Nozick co-founded an influential group of philosophers known as the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy. In the 1970s, Nagel also co-founded the philosophy journal Philosophy & Public Affairs. Nagel is known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings. He continued the critique of reductionism in Mind and Cosmos (2012), in which he argues against the neo-Darwinian view of the emergence of consciousness. After graduation, he won a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue graduate studies in England at the University of Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Philosophy (B.Phil.) in 1960 as a member of Corpus Christi College. In 2008 he was awarded a Rolf Schock Prize for his work in philosophy, the Balzan Prize, and the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Oxford. His distinctive ideas were first presented in the short monograph The Possibility of Altruism, published in 1970.
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