The View from Nowhere

Introduction

A book of 1986 that pursues one problem through many fields: how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with a detached view of the world that includes that person – the “view from nowhere”. Nagel applies the question to mind and body, knowledge, free will, value, ethics and the meaning of life. Objectivity is a method of stepping back, but it cannot capture everything; the subjective point of view is not an illusion to be eliminated. In ethics he defends both agent-neutral reasons and agent-relative ones, such as special obligations to those close to us. The final chapter turns to birth, death and the meaning of life.

Connections

Builds on

• What Is It Like to Be a Bat?1974 · Thomas Nagel

More works by Thomas Nagel

• 1974What Is It Like to Be a Bat?