Product Description

Thomas Nagel’s Mortal Questions explores some fundamental issues concerning the meaning, nature and value of human life. Questions about our attitudes to death, sexual behaviour, social inequality, war and political power are shown to lead to more obviously philosophical problems about personal identity, consciousness, freedom, and value. This original and illuminating book aims at a form of understanding that is both theoretical and personal in its lively engagement with what are literally issues of life and death.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #164334 in Books
• Published on: 1991-05-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 229 pages

Review
‘Thomas Nagel writes with all the clarity and all the plainness of style that analytical philosophers have always admired ... if anyone can seize and keep the general reader’s attention, it must be Thomas Nagel with this book.’ New Statesman

‘... a fine achievement. Few professional philosophers have written so rationally and agreeably on such a variety of difficult and serious problems.’ P. F. Strawson, New York Review of Books

‘These essays ... convey to an interested non-philosopher a real sense of the excitement and significance of philosophical enquiry.’ R. A. Duff, The Literary Review

Customer Reviews

Read it!
This is an eminently readable collection of Nagel's essays, on an eclectic mix of topics.

The book opens with 'Death', which seems to me to be an important piece on a much neglected subject, moving through 'The Absurd' (an analytic look at existentialism), Nagel goes on to discuss Equality, and masterfully reveals the foibles of much ethical theory in 'the fragmentation of value'. The final piece, 'what is it like to be a bat' is a landmark paper in philosophy of mind.

If philosophy books are rated on the amount of truth they contain, then this one rates very highly. Thoroughly recommended.

Good ideas, badly argued
This book is caught between two places: whilst still retaining its standing as an acclaimed piece of academic philosophy, it also tries to make itself readable to the general public. In this it seems quite successful - the topics are interesting and well engaged with, with interesting examples and some unusual arguments that everyone with an interest in philosophy will appreciate.

Unfortunately, the major problem is that Nagel's arguments and conclusions are not always made explicit. This is the kind of boom you can read and think that you have understood perfectly, and yet if try and draw his arguments out in to basic premiss and conclusion form an utter nightmare ensues. Nagel leaps about, tackling objections before he's finished proposing something, switching to discussions of rival theories without any warning, failing to make the link between premises and conclusion explicit and occasionally embedding his actual conclusion somewhere near the beginning of the argument, without restating it.

The problem that ensues is whilst it seems prima facia simplistic to follow his dialogue, analyzing his arguments becomes a nightmare. And that, I think, is the major problem. It seems to me that no one other than the academic or the extreme enthusiast will have the time to sit down, draw out his exact arguments and think about their merit.

I would still recommend the book, but only alongside the warning that you can not expect to be able to engage with his arguments as easily you might have expected to when you first picked it up.