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Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel is University Professor Emeritus at NYU. He is the author of The View from Nowhere and Mind and Cosmos, among other books. (March 2017)

IN THE REVIEW

Is Consciousness an Illusion?

Daniel Dennett at the Centro Cultural de la Ciencia, Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 2016

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

by Daniel C. Dennett
For fifty years the philosopher Daniel Dennett has been engaged in a grand project of disenchantment of the human world, using science to free us from what he deems illusions—illusions that are difficult to dislodge because they are so natural. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, his eighteenth book …

How They Wrestled with the New

The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

by Anthony Gottlieb
Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume lived in a historical period dominated by dramatic developments and conflicts in three areas—science, religion, and politics—and their thoughts and writings were dominated by the need to respond to those developments, and to understand the relations among them.

Listening to Reason

Being Realistic about Reasons

by T.M. Scanlon
Edward Gorey Charitable Trust Philosophy has always been concerned with the largest questions of what exists and what is the case. Not specific questions like “Is there extraterrestrial life?” or “What is the speed of light in a vacuum?” but maximally general questions about what kinds of things …

After You’ve Gone

Caspar David Friedrich: Chalk Cliffs in Ruegen, 1818–1819

Death and the Afterlife

by Samuel Scheffler, edited and with an introduction by Niko Kolodny, and with commentaries by Susan Wolf, Harry G. Frankfurt, Seana Valentine Shiffrin, and Niko Kolodny
We are all going to die, and the world will go on without us. In this highly original book Samuel Scheffler explores the powerful but often unnoticeable ways in which these obvious facts affect the values that govern our lives and the motives that shape them. The afterlife referred to …

Ronald Dworkin: The Moral Quest

Ronald Dworkin, Martha’s Vineyard, August 2005

Ronald Dworkin

by Stephen Guest
Ronald Dworkin, who died on February 14 of this year, began to contribute to The New York Review of Books in 1968. His strong opinions and lucid prose helped to give the paper its distinctive tone, and he achieved through those writings on the law and politics of our time …