Quotes from Thomas Nagel

What sustains us, in belief as in action, is not reason or justification, but something more basic than these--for we go on in the same way even after we are convinced that the reasons have given out. 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.

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.

The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle's day.

The subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality, and it must occupy as fundamental a place in any credible world view as matter, energy, space, time and numbers.

too many hypotheses and systems of thought in philosophy and elsewhere are based on the bizarre view that we, at this point in history, are in possession of the basic forms of understanding needed to comprehend absolutely anything.

The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.

The sum total of a person's experiences, desires and knowledge, his hereditary constitution, the social circumstances and the nature of the choice facing him, together with other factors that we may not know about, all combine to make a particular action in the circumstances inevitable.

Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately therefore such beings should be comprehensible to themselves.

Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside

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?

But 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.

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

The way the world is includes appearances, and there is no single point of view from which they can all be fully grasped!. An

Everyone acknowledges that there are vast amounts we do not know, and that enormous opportunities for progress in understanding lie before us. But scientific naturalists claim to know what the form of that progress will be, and to know that mentalistic, teleological, or evaluative intelligibility in particular have been left behind for good as fundamental forms of understanding.

All these theories are motivated by an epistemological criterion of reality—that only what can be understood in a certain way exists.

If we continue to assume that we are parts of the physical world and that the evolutionary process that brought us into existence is part of its history, then something must be added to the physical conception of the natural order that allows us to explain how it can give rise to organisms that are more than physical. The resources of physical science are not adequate for this purpose, because those resources were developed to account for data of a completely different kind.

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness.

Persons and other conscious beings are part of the natural order, and their mental states are part of the way the world is in itself.

I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My interest is in the territory between them.

One of the things that drive the various reductionist programs about mind, value, and meaning, in spite of their inherent implausibility, is the lack of any comprehensive alternative.

The things we do or want without reasons, and without requiring reasons - the things that define what is a reason for us and what is not-are the starting points of our skepticism. 

These essays are about life: about its end, its meaning, its value, and about the metaphysics of consciousness. Some of the topics have not received much attention from analytic philosophers, because it is hard to be clear and precise about them, and hard to separate from a mixture of facts and feelings those questions abstract enough for philosophical treatment.

There may or may not be an external world, and if there is it may or may not be completely different from how it seems to you—there's no way for you to tell. This view is called skepticism about the external world.

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