Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel (born 1937) is an American philosopher whose 1974 paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat? introduced the phrase that has since colonized all serious discussion of phenomenal consciousness. The question Nagel raised — whether there is something it is like to be an organism, and whether that something can be captured by any objective physical description — remains unanswered. The fact that it remains unanswered fifty years later is either a sign of philosophy's depth or its dysfunction.

Nagel's core argument is that subjective experience is not capturable by objective methods. Consciousness is essentially perspectival — a bat's echolocation experience, however completely described from the outside, cannot convey what it is like from the inside. This is not an empirical limitation but a conceptual one: objective description eliminates the first-person perspective that is precisely what is to be explained.

His later work The View from Nowhere (1986) extends this into a broader critique of reductive explanation across philosophy of mind and ethics. Nagel argues that the drive to explain everything from an objective standpoint is not the expansion of understanding but its partial impoverishment — the progressive elimination of the viewpoint that makes knowledge worth having. Whether this is profound or a refusal to update under pressure from science is the question that divides his readers.