Concealment and Exposure: And Other Essays
Thomas Nagel
Language: English
Pages: 243
ISBN: B00WBN4U2I
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Thomas Nagel is widely recognized as one of the top American philosophers working today. Reflecting the diversity of his many philosophical preoccupations, this volume is a collection of his most recent critical essays and reviews.
The first section, Public and Private, focuses on the notion of privacy in the context of social and political issues, such as the impeachment of President Clinton. The second section, Right and Wrong, discusses moral, political and legal theory, and includes pieces on John Rawls, G.A. Cohen, and T.M. Scanlon, among others. The final section, Mind and Reality, features discussions of Richard Rorty, Donald Davidson, and the Sokal hoax, and closes with a substantial new essay on the mind-body problem. Written with characteristic rigor, these pieces reveal the intellectual passion underlying the incisive analysis for which Nagel is known.
Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt
Deleuze and Politics (Deleuze Connections)
Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach
Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism
enemy of progress. In a way, the campaign against the neutral use of the masculine pronoun, the constant replacement of names for racial groups, and all the other euphemisms are more comic than anything else, but they are also part of an unhealthy social climate, not so distant from the climate that requires demonstrations of patriotism in periods of xenophobia. To some extent it is possible to exercise collective power over people’s inner lives by controlling the conventions of expression, not
In the present philosophical climate, depth is unfashionable, and systematic, scientifically based theories of knowledge, thought, and reality are again pursued without embarrassment by analytic philosophers much more in the mold of Russell than of Wittgenstein. (Indeed, the idea that the problems of philosophy can be solved by the methods of science has been taken by some philosophers much further than Russell would have contemplated.) Things will certainly change again, but in Russell’s
personal morality is another. Justice is conceived as a specifically political virtue, leaving individuals free to live their lives in pursuit of their own aims and commitments, be these hedonistic or puritanical, libertine or devoutly religious. The special demands of equal respect for the interests of all that justice imposes apply to the sphere of collectively sustained institutions, not to personal life. So liberalism involves a division of the moral territory and leaves individuals free to
antiegalitarian position is appropriate for support for the arts, scientific research, exploration, pure scholarship, architecture, and so forth. 128 Right and Wrong V To get into deeper and hotter water, let me turn to the responsibility of nature for the difference between the sexes. Sex is not a dimension along which people vary, like intelligence or athletic ability. People simply come in two sexes, whatever other categories they are divided into. The purely natural differences do not give
opportunities for women are parasitic on a more fundamental social fact, the sexual division of labor, and not on the direct interaction between biological sexuality and the nonsexual labor market. Social institutions do not in this case merely create a dimension of variation in occupational roles that then interacts with natural differences between men and women to produce different results, on average. Rather, the labor market interacts with the status difference between men and women. The