Tag: Thomas Nagel
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If one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers but the seed remains.
Do you ever wonder about the soul? I mean, were we all issued one at birth, or as the French philosopher Sartre believed, does existence proceed essence? Do we have to somehow establish our existence before we can acquire qualities? In grammar, a noun must be present or adjectives have no meaning; no purpose. Are…
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What is it like to be a…?
When I first read the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ essay, I was intrigued by his idea that ‘an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism’. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Empathy -the ability…
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Masters of their fates?
Sentience is the present participle of the Latin verb sentire –‘to feel’- but what is it? What does it imply? Consciousness? Thought? Or merely some form of awareness of the surroundings, however indistinct and vague? Is avoidance of a noxious stimulus enough to establish sentience, or does it have to involve an understanding that it…
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That way madness lies
To portray something -to make it believable- there has to be at least some understanding by the audience of what is being portrayed. Much in the sense, I suppose, that was suggested in the 1974 paper in The Philosophical Review by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, asking what it would be like to be a…
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What is it like to be a…?
I should have known not to answer her question like that. I should have seen the book she was reading; I should have seen how heavy her briefcase was… But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m a doctor now -an obstetrician/gynaecologist- but in the beginning I wanted to head in an an entirely different direction:…
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