menu

Thinkers

Thomas Nagel

Analytic · North America · born 1937

American philosopher who asked what it is like to be a bat, and who argues that physical science alone cannot explain consciousness.

What it is

Thomas Nagel (born 1937) is an American philosopher. He was born in Belgrade, became a United States citizen in 1944, and studied at Cornell, Oxford and Harvard, where John Rawls supervised his doctorate. He taught at Berkeley and Princeton and then at New York University.

He is best known for a short essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his argument about the limits of an objective, impersonal way of describing the world when it is applied to the mind.

The main ideas

  • Something it is like. A creature has conscious states, he said, if and only if there is something it is like to be that creature, something it is like for the creature itself.
  • The bat. Facts about what it is like to be a bat can be fully understood only from the bat's own point of view, and we cannot take up that point of view. For Nagel this points to a limit on what a purely objective description of the world can capture.
  • The view from nowhere. He argued that science's attempt at an objective viewpoint, a view from nowhere, leaves out something essential when applied to the mind, which inherently has a subjective point of view.
  • Ethics. The Possibility of Altruism, from around 1970, was an early book on ethics, and his later writing has also covered moral and political theory.
  • Recognition. In 2008 he received the Rolf Schock Prize and the Balzan Prize.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine a doctor who has read everything about a patient's pain, with scans and measurements, and who then sits beside the patient and listens. Nagel would say that the file, however complete, leaves out what the pain is like for the patient. This is an illustration of his line of thought, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • The Possibility of Altruism is an early book on ethics, from around 1970.
  • What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974) is the essay that made the phrase familiar.
  • Mortal Questions (1979) is a collection of essays.
  • The View from Nowhere (1986) is another of his books.

Questions and criticism

  • Does the bat argument show too much? It is fair to ask whether the fact that we cannot imagine a bat's experience shows that physical science will always leave it out, or only that imagination is limited.
  • What would a fuller science look like? If objective description leaves out the inside view, it is an open question what other kind of account could bring the two together.
  • How far can the objective and the subjective views be brought together? Whether they can finally fit into a single picture is left open here.

Close neighbours

The pages on John Searle and David Chalmers take up the same puzzle of how experience relates to the brain, and the page on John Rawls covers the teacher who supervised his doctorate.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • David Chalmers · Chalmers took up his point that the inner, felt side of experience is left out by physical accounts. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Analytic thinkers

Sources we used

See where you stand Find them on the map

Something wrong or missing on this page? Tell us.