b. 1937
Thomas Nagel (born 1937) is an American philosopher and University Professor Emeritus at New York University, renowned for contributions to philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. His 1974 essay 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' established the hard problem of subjective consciousness as a central challenge to physicalism. His work consistently interrogates the tension between objective scientific accounts and the irreducible first-person perspective.
Authored 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' (1974), defining the explanatory gap between physical description and subjective experience
Developed the objective/subjective tension in 'The View from Nowhere' (1986)
Advanced egalitarian political philosophy in 'Equality and Partiality' (1991)
Critiqued neo-Darwinian materialism in 'Mind and Cosmos' (2012)
Distinguished agent-relative from agent-neutral reasons, influencing contemporary moral theory