Enhance Your Quote Experience
Enjoy ad-free browsing, unlimited collections, and advanced search features with Premium.
" "The idealist tradition, including contemporary phenomenology, has of course admitted subjective points of view as basic and has gone to the opposite length of denying an irreducible objective reality. … I find the idealist solution unacceptable …: objective reality cannot be analyzed or shut out of existence any more than subjective reality can. Even if not everything is something from no point of view, some things are.<p>The deep source of both idealism and its objectifying opposite is the same: a conviction that a single world cannot contain both irreducible points of view and irreducible objective reality — that one of them must be what there really is and the other somehow reducible or dependent on it. This is a very powerful idea. To deny it is in a sense to deny that there is a single world.
Thomas Nagel (born 4 July 1937) is an American philosopher. He is University Professor of Philosophy and Law, Emeritus, at New York University, where he taught from 1980 to 2016. His main areas of philosophical interest are legal philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics.
Enjoy ad-free browsing, unlimited collections, and advanced search features with Premium.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
[W]hen the objective gaze is turned on human beings and other experiencing creatures, who are undeniably parts of the world, it can reveal only what they are like in themselves. And if the way things are for these subjects is not part of the way things are in themselves, an objective account, whatever it shows, will omit something. So reality is not just objective reality, and the pursuit of objectivity is not an equally effective method of reaching the truth about everything.