In case you wondered …

… Why Darwinist Materialism is Wrong. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

NAGEL IS NOT AFRAID to take unpopular positions, and he does not seem to mind the obloquy that goes with that territory. “In the present climate of a dominant scientific naturalism,” he writes, “heavily dependent on speculative Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against attacks from religion, I have thought it useful to speculate about possible alternatives. Above all, I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the world.” Nagel has endorsed the negative conclusions of the much-maligned Intelligent Design movement, and he has defended it from the charge that it is inherently unscientific. In 2009 he even went so far as to recommend Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, a flagship declaration of Intelligent Design, as a book of the year. For that piece of blasphemy Nagel paid the predictable price; he was said to be arrogant, dangerous to children, a disgrace, hypocritical, ignorant, mind-polluting, reprehensible, stupid, unscientific, and in general a less than wholly upstanding citizen of the republic of letters.

See also Plantinga Reviews Nagel. (Also sent by Dave.)

Peculiar ...

... Nagel on Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Nagel makes it clear that he is talking about the fear of religion as such, and not merely fear of certain of its excesses and aberrations, and confesses that he himself is subject to this fear:

I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. (130, emphasis added)

Nagel goes on to say that he may have what he calls a "cosmic authority problem." This seems to me to suggest that he also has a very primitive notion of God. Maybe he should see if he has, say, a "cosmic artist problem." The view of God as a kind of everlasting Hammurabi is an old one, but its longevity does not make it true. Subjects may genuinely love their king because he is genuinely lovable. But if he is not lovable -- if, indeed, he is hateful -- their expressions of love are purely self-protective. This is perhaps a greater problem with believers than with unbelievers. One often gets the impression that the faithful talk about God's loving us because they are afraid of saying otherwise. But the God they really believe in seems to be a stern authoritarian just waiting to catch them in some infraction of the law and punish them accordingly. But, as Jesus noted, "the law was made for man, not man for the law." A good bit of it also seems to have been made by man.

Hmm …

… Thomas Nagel: Thoughts Are Real : The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Since neither physics nor Darwinian biology—the concept of evolution—can account for the emergence of a mental world from a physical one, Nagel contends that the mental side of existence must somehow have been present in creation from the very start. But then he goes further, into strange and visionary territory. He argues that the faculty of reason is different from perception and, in effect, prior to it—“an irreducible faculty.” He suggests that any theory of the universe, any comprehensive mesh of physics and biology, will need to succeed in “showing how the natural order is disposed to generate beings capable of comprehending it.”

 And this, he argues, would be a theory of teleology—a preprogrammed or built-in tendency in the universe toward the particular goal of fulfilling the possibilities of mentality. In a splendid image, Nagel writes, “Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”

Of course, the preprogrammed  or built-in tendency is where the trouble starts. Preprogrammed or built in by what or whom?

Mind and matter …

… Looking for Meaning in All the Wrong Places. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Two celebrated recent books by philosophers—Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (2011) and Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos (2012)—see the problem more clearly than Wilson and other contemporary scientists tend to. Rosenberg’s mad but intellectually honest solution is to conclude that if matter as physics conceives of it is all that exists, mind must really be an illusion. Nagel’s sane but no less intellectually honest solution is to conclude that since mind and matter both exist but mind cannot be assimilated to matter as conceived of by physics, it follows that physics does not give us a complete account of  matter. There must in Nagel’s view be more to matter than physics reveals, some additional ingredient that could account for the origin of consciousness, meaning, and value. 

Distinguishing philosophy from science …

… Edward Feser: Man is Wolff to man. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… it is no good for Wolff to complain that Nagel has failed to “trac[e], step by step, the neurological development of species that appear to be located somewhere along the continuum between consciousness and non-consciousness.”  Nagel and other very prominent philosophers have developed arguments which purport to show that no amount of neurological evidence could by itself even in principle explain consciousness.  These arguments are extremely well-known in academic philosophy; more to the present point, they are surely well known to Wolff.  Wolff may disagree with the arguments, but insofar as he pretends that they don’t exist, it is he rather than Nagel who is guilty of “philosophical malpractice.”

Back and forth …

… Oh God! by A.C. Grayling and Ian Alterman | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I was about to say much the same thing as Nagel does in response to Grayling. I'll leave it to Nagel. I also agree with Nagel about "the incomprehension of God's purposes." See Job.

Idea-rich …

… Maverick Philosopher: Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Overview.

See also: Nagel's Reason for Rejecting Theism.

Hmm …

… Thomas Nagel Is Praised by Creationists - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… since the late October release of his latest book, “Mind and Cosmos,” reviewers have given Mr. Nagel ample cause to ponder another question: What is it like to be an eminent (and avowedly atheist) philosopher accused of giving aid and comfort to creationist enemies of science? … Advocates of intelligent design have certainly been enthusiastic….

Someone should explain to Ms. Schuessler that Intelligent Design theory and "creationism" are not the same thing. Michael Behe, I believe, advocates ID theory, but he actually is a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University. So he can hardly be described as an enemy of science. Following Ms. Schuessler's implied line of thought, anyone who believed in God would be an enemy of science, since people who believe in God think of God as the creator of the universe. Fortunately, John Polkinghorne's faith did not prevemt him from playing a major role in the discovery of quarks. Nor did Georges Lemaitre's keep him from discovering the Big Bang. And by the way, though I am myself a person of faith, I do not subscibe to ID theory. It works both ways, you see. 

Becoming aware...

...THOMAS NAGEL: THOUGHTS ARE REAL

Nagel offers mental activity as a special realm of being and life as a special condition—in the same way that biology is a special realm of science, distinct from physics. His argument is that, if the mental things arising from the minds of living things are a distinct realm of existence, then strictly physical theories about the origins of life, such as Darwinian theory, cannot be entirely correct. Life cannot have arisen solely from a primordial chemical reaction, and the process of natural selection cannot account for the creation of the realm of mind. Biology, in his view, becomes a variety of science that is radically distinct from physics—it deals with a vast and crucial realm of phenomena that physics doesn’t and can’t encompass, precisely because they’re aspects of living things that are not physical:

Vintage debate …

… Thomas Nagel and Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell | TLS.

(I found this by virtue of a link to Nagel's blurb that dave Lull sent me.)

Finding the good …

… Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes Reviewed by Thomas Nagel | New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It seems to me that difference between the footbridge dilemma and the switch dilemma is that the former entails a direct assault on a person, using that person as a means to an end, whereas the latter entails an action that has a grievous collateral consequence. So in the latter you have something on the order of the principle of double effect.

Continuing …

… Edward Feser: Nagel and his critics, Part V. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Reason or sentiment?

… The Taste for Being Moral by Thomas Nagel | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Something to think on …

It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.

— Thomas Nagel, born on this date in 1937

Does mind matter? Or does matter mind?

… Nagel’s Untimely Idea | Commonweal magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Hmm …

… Materialism alone cannot explain the riddle of consciousness | Aeon Essays. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It’s been more than 20 years since the Australian philosopher David Chalmers introduced the idea of a ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Following work by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, Chalmers pointed to the vividness – the intrinsic presence – of the perceiving subject’s experience as a problem no explanatory account of consciousness seems capable of embracing.

Which brings to mind (as it were) Ronald Knox's question: “Can anything matter, unless there is Somebody who minds?”

For a start …

… Edward Feser: Nagel and his critics, Part I. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

To kill or not …

… Thomas Nagel reviews ‘Objective Troy’ by Scott Shane — LRB 3 March 2016. (Ht tip, Dave Lull.)

The president as killer is a chilling new face of the role of commander-in-chief. I suspect that it is the personal, individualised nature of drone warfare that many people find so repellent. It is easier to be resigned to the slaughter of faceless multitudes by conventional missiles, bombs and artillery, with the inevitable attendant collateral damage, in pursuit of legitimate military objectives. War is hell, as we all know. But when the president puts someone on a kill list to be taken out by a precise drone strike, it creates the illusory sense of a more direct responsibility for that death than for the other kind. It feels like an execution, though it is just retail warfare, and the responsibility, individual and collective, is equally great in both cases.

For what it's worth …

… Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: Log-rolling in our time: the Nagel/Plantinga saga.

Swatting a fly ...

... Maverick Philosopher: Sensus Divinitatis: Nagel Defends Plantinga Against Grayling. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I've long that Grayling was overrated, but is he really that ignorant? Or does he think the rest of us are?