Thomas Nagel Quotes

It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes.

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

Reductionism is merciless.

The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.

To me, what philosophy does best is reflect on knowledge that's generated in other areas.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.

From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

I like cutting through complexity and trying to get to the kernel of an idea.

It is clear that while science provides insights into the complexity of the world around us, those insights...present a fractured mosaic rather than a seamless whole. There are profound limits to science that must be recognized if we are to minimize the destructive consequences of using the powers provided by scientific discovery.

Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method ... changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the object.

Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.

By using your intelligence, you can sometimes make your problems twice as complicated.

Nature is not embarrassed by difficulties of analysis.

The task of science is to stake out the limits of the knowable, and to center consciousness within them.

Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.

Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.

Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.