In ‘The Possibility of Altruism’ and ‘The View From Nowhere’, Thomas Nagel worries that we do not really comprehend ourselves as elements of the spatio-temporal world, at all. This is no trivial worry: for a start, the very intelligibility of theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge rests on its being an illusion. For us, Nagel’s worry will play the role of an anchor, helping us to chart a course through certain pivotal English texts in philosophy. Our course will fall into three parts: first, we shall distil Nagel’s own presentation of his worry from the two aforementioned texts; second, by drawing on Elizabeth Anscombe’s ‘The First Person’ and parts of Gareth Evans’
‘The Varieties of Reference’, we shall develop a more rigorous, and far more troubling, understanding of Nagel’s worry; and finally, by reflecting on Stanley Cavell’s notion of ‘acknowledgment’, a notion which may be of the most fundamental importance to philosophy in general, we shall begin to grasp the dissolution of Nagel’s worry.
- Trainer/in: Jack McGrath