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" "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.
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A feature of experience is subjective if it can in principle be understood only from one type of point of view: that of a being like the one having the experience, or at least like it in the relevant modality. The phenomenological qualities of our own experiences are subjective in this way. The physical events in our brains are not. Human physiologists may take a special interest in them; but they can, in principle, be understood just as well, or even better, by creatures totally unlike us in physical and mental structure. To understand them such creatures need not take up our point of view. Physical brain processes can be understood objectively, from the outside, because they are not subjective phenomena. And no description or analysis of the objective nervous system, however complete, will ever by itself imply anything which is not objective, i.e. which can be understood only from one kind of viewpoint, that of the being whose states are being described. One cannot derive a pour soi from an en soi.