Thomas Nagel
Andrea Eugenio Cavanna, Andrea Nani
Consciousness 2014 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-44088-9_11 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Keywords | Nagel claims Phenomenological objects Subjective point Intrinsic privacy |
| Key points | The text recounts that Nagel's 1974 article 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' gave philosophers a widely used phrase for the subjective character of experience, the 'what-is-it-like-to-be-a-something,' and that David Chalmers later called this issue the hard problem of consciousness. |
Abstract
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher currently teaching Philosophy and Law at New York University. In 1974, he published an article – titled What Is It Like to Be a Bat? – that had enormous resonance in the community of philosophers of mind. The expression used by Nagel in his article has become a mesmerizing phrase in the common usage among philosophers to indicate the subjective feature of any phenomenal experience, that is, the what-is-it-like-to-be-a-something. This issue would have been called by another philosopher, David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness studies (see Chap. 1 ).