Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.
Thomas NagelRead
There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
Interpretation
What this quote means
People often look for objective proof before accepting something as real.
Thomas Nagel highlights a common human inclination to demand objective evidence or logical justification for concepts or experiences before acknowledging their existence or reality. This tendency signifies how skepticism influences perception, often causing delays in acceptance of subjective experiences that may hold significance even in the absence of empirical verification.
Themes
RealityObjectivitySubjectivityPerceptionSkepticism
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate about the existence of emotions, you might use this quote to highlight the role of personal experience vs. objective evidence.
More from Thomas Nagel
All quotes βTo look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.
Thomas NagelRead
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. We are supposed to abandon this naΓ―ve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.
Thomas NagelRead
Altruism itself depends on a recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.
Thomas NagelRead
Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.
Thomas NagelRead
The external view [of agency] forces itself on us at the same time that we resist it. One way this occurs is through the gradual erosion of what we do by the subtraction of what happens.
Thomas NagelRead
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