The View from Nowhere

by Thomas Nagel

Book Overview

Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way: We can think about the world in terms that transcend our own experience or interest, and consider the world from a vantage point that is, in Nagel's words, "nowhere in particular." At the same time, each of us is a particular person in a particular place, each with his own "personal" view of the world, a view that we can recognize as just one aspect of the whole. How do we reconcile...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195056442
• ISBN13: 9780195056440
• Release Date: February 1989
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Stimulating and Synoptic Account of Philosophy's Problems

Sorry for the double post here. (I'll try to get this one removed.)Still, I can say a bit more about this book. This isn't a technical book, and I think it should be accessible to anyone interested in general philosophical issues. It's not an easy read--it's subtle and Nagel is sometimes a bit obscure--but it's not forbiddingly difficult and it doesn't presume that the reader is as knowledgeable about contemporary philosopohy as its author is. However, that's not to say that this is a book that fails to engage with the literature on these topics. It's clear that Nagel is familiar with the relevant contemporary work on these topics, and the book is accessible enough that it might server as a high-level introdution to the more technical literature in these areas. And it certainly provides you with a way to see the technical literature as concerned with fundamental human concerns.Also, it's somewhat inspiring to see someone take on a grand project of this sort. Philosophy is becoming an increasingly specialized discipline, and it's nice to see someone trying to fit a lot of what is going on into a general picture of the origins and nature of genuine philosophical problems.

Stimulating and Synoptic Account of Philosophy's Concerns

This is a major work in metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. It's essentially a summary of a career of thought concerning the central issues in philosophy, and it is built around Nagel's big idea: that the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity can help us to understand the nature and source of the central problems of philosophy. It's an interesting and fruitful idea--though perhaps not as interesting and fruitful as he thinks--and it leads Nagel to lots of interesting ideas about how to understand, appreciate, and maybe even solve the central problems of philosophy. The main subject of the book is the relation between subjective and objective views of our minds, our selves, our thought, our actions, our moral views, etc. The subjective view is our limited point of view: it's the point of view we have when immersed in our own perspective on the world. We reach more objective points of view by subtracting the parochial elements from our perspective. In attempting to arrive at a more objective point of view, we step back from ourselves and place ourselves, along with our subjective points of view, in a broader conception of the world. This involves trying to see the world as it would appear to a being with a "view from nowhere."But problems arise when we realize that it's difficult to integrate subjective and objective perspectives. There is a tension between subjectivity and objectivity, and this tension appears in all areas of philosophy. As a matter of fact, it's the source of most of the fundamental problems that plague philosophers. When we take up a more objective viewpoint, the central elements of our subjective viewpoints are inexplicable. When we arrive a more objective conception of the world by, say, doing more science, we find it hard to understand how we can have minds, how our ways of forming beliefs allow us to know the objective world, how we can make sense of objective reasons for action, etc. But these apparently inexplicable things are among the crucial components of our subjective conception of the world and ourselves. And we encounter a similar problem in the other direction. When we are immersed in our subjective viewpoints, we find it hard to place ourselves and our viewpoint within an objective account of the world. That is, we find it hard to see how our ways of knowing could be backed up in a way that makes them more than simply our ways of knowing, and we find it hard to see how our ways of acting could be backed up in a way that makes them more than simply our ways of acting. Nagel treats most of the traditional "solutions" to the problems of philosophy as based on two general tactics for dealing with the tension between objectivity and subjectivity. According to Nagel, neither tactic is fully satisfactory. The first tactic is to understand everything as objective, and the construe the subjective as mere appearance. In contemporary thought, this tactic is manifest in overreaching fo

Don't be 'Confuzed'

Please don't be confused by an earlier post (which, thankfully, no one seems to have taken seriously) stating that there is some confusion in Nagel's own ideas about the possibility of objective knowledge. Nagel is a smart man, and it is not surprising that the subtleties of his arguments may be lost on some. He says it doesn't look like we can ever gain objective knowledge, basically, because we simply _are_ all our personality traits etc. that all go into determining how we see the world. His arguments about free will are very good and strangely overlooked. This is quite simply one of the best books on philosophy I have ever read, despite the fact that I agree with almost none of it; well composed, well thought-out, and well argued.

Excellent Book

This is one of the ten or so most important works of philosophy of the past twenty-five years. Nagel, more than anyone else, is responsible for the re-examination now going on within Anglo-American philosophy of scientific materialism and of the reductionism and scientism that has gone along with it. Across a wide variety of philosophical problems, the book examines the hold that scientific materialism has had on recent thinking, and it suggests a number of ways that we can loosen that hold. Some of the suggestions are dazzling; even more dazzling are some of the problems themselves, which are discussed nowhere else. Be wary of critics of the book who rate it low; not only do they display their bias against the book's positions but also their inability to appreciate insight in somebody with whom they disagree.

Read this -- you'll either love it or hate it.

I usually try to review only books that have not yet been reviewed, but I had to weigh in on this one.As you can tell from the other reviews, this is a book that tends to polarize readers. The book has this effect, I believe, because it takes a stand on some crucial and interrelated issues in philosophy: the relationship between the mental and the physical, what it is to be the "same person," and objectivity in ethics.The American pragmatist William James once said that there are two kinds of philosophers: the heard-headed and the soft-hearted. On the above issues, the hard-headed philosophers tend to say that what is real is what is objective. The soft-hearted tend to say that, while objectivity has its place, any adequate view of the world must acknowledge the reality of one's own subjective viewpoint, and one's own personal commitments and projects. Nagel is in the soft-hearted camp, which means that he will draw the ire of the heard-headed thinkers. (Professional philosophers will recognize that I am greatly oversimplifying -- but remember that most readers are not professional philosophers.)Hard-headed philosophers will also object to Nagel's style. He can be somewhat obscure at points. However, Nagel suggests that it is sometimes worth being unclear but closer to the truth, rather than being very clear, yet far from it. That said, he is hardly as obscure as, say, Kant or Sartre (to pick two examples at random). And I think someone bright who is willing to think hard, and who wants to listen in as a major philosopher argues with his colleagues over major issues in contemporary philosophy, would get a lot out of this book. (Indeed, I think such a reader would get more out this book than she would out of a "dumbed down" popular book on philosophy.)