Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel gave contemporary philosophy of mind its defining criterion of phenomenal consciousness. In his seminal 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (The Philosophical Review, DOI: 10.2307/2183914), he argued that an organism is conscious if and only if there is “something that it is like” to be that organism, an irreducible subjective, first-person character of experience.

Nagel’s position challenges purely objective, third-person physicalist and functionalist accounts. Because human sensory experience is grounded in vision and hearing, humans cannot comprehend the subjective point of view of a bat’s echolocation system, even with a complete physical description of its neurophysiology.

In Mind and Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-991975-8), Nagel extended this critique to evolutionary materialist reductionism, arguing that a complete scientific understanding of nature must account for consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality rather than an accidental byproduct of physical complexity.

Known for. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974), the subjective character of experience, and Mind and Cosmos (2012)

Coverage on this site

• Project Hail Mary and what Rocky assumes about non-human consciousness August 2026

Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.