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Product Details
Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (November 1, 2001)
This has to be one of the best books I've read on the debate between realism vs relativism.
Nagel who is also a rationalist takes the side of realism and argues on the relevant topics such as science, language, ethics and logic. In fact the chapter on logic was my favorite, he devotes a good amount of time towards Rene'Descartes with criticisms and aspects that he is in agreement with. In the end Thomas Nagel actually holds to the 'cogito' and rightly so. Of course you'll see the names of other prominent philosophers from the past and present pop up such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke, Immanuel Kant and Hilary Putnam.
One of his finest quotes in the book shows why cases of objectivism in certain circumstances are basically inescapable.
"The general aim for such reasoning is the to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves and of how it appears to us and others. We proceed by generating, comparing, and ranking possible versions, and it is these comparisons that are the substance of the process. But we begin from the idea that there is some way the world is, and this, I believe, is an idea to which there is no intellible alternative and which cannot be subordinated to or derived from anything else. My aim is to argue that even a subjectivist cannot escape from or rise above this idea".
Indeed it appears that objectivism seems to have 'The Last word" on matters.
This book is more towards an intermediate reader of philosophy, though I can see a beginner grasping the 'gist' of this book as well.
I highly recommend this
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Ostensibly, Nagel's work is an assault on extreme relativism/subjectivism. On another level, it complements Nozick's "Nature of Rationality" (while rightly attacking Nozick's misuse of evolutionary principles). If extreme relativism/subjectivism were the sole objective, Nagel could have defeated it with a single statement: "All truth/logic/science/ethics is relative/subjective," is self-refuting (which Nagel cites).
But the rationalist Nagel really has a stronger objective. He rightly wants to insist that constructivist/subjectivist/relativist (he uses "perceptivist") claims against reason, logic, science, and ethics are embedded in the very criteria they want to deny, and worse, their efforts to use external criteria "to get outside" to challenge these claims is (1) impossible (because they use the very tools they criticize), or (2) untenable, because they use irreducible principles in one category to assault irreducible principles in another, or Ryle's "category mistake (misuse)," (3) implausible, because they substitute less plausible hypotheses to assault rationally and empirically more plausible hypotheses, or (4) two or more of the preceding three. Except for ethics, his observations are valid.
The chapter on ethics is more elusive and certainly inconclusive. He begins with ethics as a species of practical reason, itself a feature of decision-theory, which is distinctly non-instrumental (a controversial claim, he concedes), that requires "reasons" (i.e., justifications). Except for the "non-instrumental" claim, there is nothing controversial thus far. Everything that follows, however, seems lost.Read more ›
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