By Thomas Nagel
ISBN-10: 0195149831
ISBN-13: 9780195149838
If there's this type of factor as cause, it needs to be common. cause needs to replicate aim rules whose validity is self sustaining of our aspect of view--principles that anybody with adequate intelligence needs to be capable of realize as right. yet this generality of cause is what relativists and subjectivists deny in ever-increasing numbers. And such subjectivism is not only an inconsequential highbrow flourish or badge of theoretical stylish. it really is exploited to deflect argument and to belittle the pretensions of the arguments of others. the continued unfold of this relativistic mind set threatens to make public discourse more and more tough and to exacerbate the deep divisions of our society. In the final word, Thomas Nagel, the most influential philosophers writing in English, offers a sustained safeguard of cause opposed to the assaults of subjectivism, providing systematic rebuttals of relativistic claims with admire to language, good judgment, technological know-how, and ethics. He indicates that the ultimate in disputes in regards to the goal validity of any kind of concept needs to lie in a few unqualified innovations approximately how issues are--thoughts that we can't regard from outdoors as mere mental tendencies.
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Additional resources for The Last Word (Philosophical Essays)
Example text
There are types of thought we cannot do without, even when we try to think of ourselves, from outside, as thinking creatures. We are no more able to get outside of those thoughts when thinking of other possible thinking creatures. So the idea of an alternative mind or conceptual scheme is useless in distancing ourselves from such thoughts: Their content defeats all attempts to relativize i t . 1 1 In the end, I believe, there is no position in intellectual space for the perspectivalist to occupy.
Such a structure shows itself constantly in the actual procedures of our thought—in its phenomenology, so to speak. The question is, what does it mean? What should our attitude toward it be? How can we reconcile it with the recognition that we are biological specimens, fallible creatures subject to a great many influences that we may not understand, and formed by causes over many of which we have no control? If we look at how people actually think, we find that the claim to objective content is pervasive.
For the case of reasoning itself, however, no such alternative is available, since any considerations against the objective validity of a type of reasoning are inevitably attempts to offer reasons against it, and these must be rationally assessed. The use of reason in the response is not a gratuitous importation by the defender: It is demanded by the character of the objections offered by the challenger. In contrast, a challenge to the authority of tea leaves does not itself lead us back to the tea leaves.