Thomas Nagel is University Professor of Philosophy and Law, Emeritus, at New York University. He works on philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. In philosophy of mind, he is best known for “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), which argues that the subjective character of consciousness resists reductive physical explanation; in ethics and political philosophy, he has written widely on altruism, equality, and global justice.
Nagel is the author of The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford, 1970), in which he argues that ethics is grounded in the structure of practical reason. His major theoretical works include The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986), Equality and Partiality (Oxford, 1991), The Last Word (Oxford, 1997), and Mind and Cosmos (Oxford, 2012), which argues against the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature. His essay collections and introductions include Mortal Questions (Cambridge, 1979), What Does It All Mean? (Oxford, 1987), and Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament (Oxford, 2010). In 2024, Oxford published a 50th-anniversary book edition of What Is It Like to Be a Bat?