Concealment and Exposure: And Other Essays [Hardcover]

Thomas Nagel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2002 | ISBN-10: 019515293X | ISBN-13: 978-0195152937

Thomas Nagel is widely recognized as one of the top American philosophers working today. Reflecting the diversity of his many philosophical preoccupations, this volume is a collection of his most recent critical essays and reviews.
The first section, Public and Private, focuses on the notion of privacy in the context of social and political issues, such as the impeachment of President Clinton. The second section, Right and Wrong, discusses moral, political and legal theory, and includes pieces on John Rawls, G.A. Cohen, and T.M. Scanlon, among others. The final section, Mind and Reality, features discussions of Richard Rorty, Donald Davidson, and the Sokal hoax, and closes with a substantial new essay on the mind-body problem. Written with characteristic rigor, these pieces reveal the intellectual passion underlying the incisive analysis for which Nagel is known.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[A] wonderful book. It is wonderful partly for the further excellent review articles that it adds to the Other Minds archive, and partly for the lively and accessible introduction it provides to Nagel's own thought and intellectual personality...[T]he essays in this volume, taken together, do more than any other philosophical writings known to me to bring out the complex and treacherous truth in the old maxim that the personal is political."--Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

About the Author

Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy and Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Law, New York University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 3, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019515293X
• ISBN-13: 978-0195152937
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,277,190 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mainly Interesting Reviews, November 11, 2002

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This review is from: Concealment and Exposure: And Other Essays (Hardcover)

Nagel can always be counted on for clarity and lucidity, and this collection of articles and reviews is no exception. This is mainly a collection of book reviews. Two articles have been reprinted elsewhere.

Part One: Private and Public.
Ch 1: Nagel discusses topics that one can also find in Sam Scheffler's (Cal) excellent book, Boundaries and Allegiances (Oxford UP) on privacy and public life. Nagel delves into sex, secrecy, deception, mendacity and politeness, taboo, adultery/Lewinsky case, scandal/Clarence Thomas, and the language of cocktail parties. I laughed out loud when I read Nagel's footnote on Paul Grice (implicature): "Let's have lunch" means "I never want to see you again in my life." Excellent.
Ch 2: Loss of Public Privacy. More on C. Thomas, Lewinsky, Clinton, and conventions of civility.
Ch 3: Personal Rights and Public Space. N. discusses normative ethics and the 'paradox of rights'--intrinsic vs. instrumental, highlighting the work of the late R. Nozick, Thomson, S. Scheffler, Kamm, and the late W. Quinn.
Ch. 4: Chastity. On Wendy Shalit's Return to Modesty. 2 pps.
Ch. 5: Nussbaum on Sexual Injustice.
Ch. 6: On Ray Monk's biography of Bertrand Russell, which talks about Russell's views on rationality and sexual freedom. N. notes that Monk's bio. is not an intellectual bio--doesn't engage R's philosophy, per se.

Part II:
Ch 7: On Rawls--a summary of some of Rawls's views, part iv and v is on T of J, and part vi is briefly on Law of the Peoples.
Ch 8: Rawls on Liberalism: on inequality of the classes, egalitarianism, taxation; part ii and iii is on R's Political Liberalism; part v is on T of J.
Ch 9: On G.A. Cohen's book, "If You're an Egalitarian..."
Ch 10: Justice and Nature. N. discusses deontology and inequity--part ii and iii is on rawls.
Ch 11: Raz on Liberty and Law
Ch 12: On Waldron's Dignity of Legislation
Ch 13: On Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other--on contractualism and utilitarianism, in part discusses scanlon's 'relativism.'
Ch 14: On Rorty's Truth and Progress.
Ch 15: On Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense.
Ch 16: "Davidson's New Cogito," which is reprinted in the Hahn/Schlipp papers--Living Philosophers Series (open court).
Ch 17: Review of Barry Stroud's Quest for Reality (which is an excellent book)
Ch 18: "Psychophysical Nexus," which is reprinted in Boghossian and Peacocke: New Essays on the Apriori (Oxford UP). This is an excellent article on the mind-body problem since Kripke's functionalism (NN).

I am more interested in the last couple of articles in the book; however, Rawls and political philosophy enthusiasts would find more interest in the previous sections.