Several readers sent this piece, which makes many of the same critical points from earlier reviews.
(Clarification: NYREOB is the acronym for New York Review of Each Other's Books which, once upon a time, was actually worth reading regularly.)
UPDATE: There's an even more critical review by Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY Grad Center) in the current London Review of Books, though it's behind a pay-wall, alas. But here's a choice paragraph:
In an early chapter Nagel summarises his view by saying that naturalism does not give a ‘sufficiently reassuring’ account of our rational capacities. At first I wondered whether he was using this phrase with tongue in cheek, but it appears not. So the question arises: sufficiently reassuring for what? Reassuring enough for us to feel OK, or reassuring enough to be true? There is a big difference. Nagel’s book is driven by a demand for intelligibility and reassurance, an insistence on them. A comparison can be made with William James, writing about these matters a little over a hundred years ago in his book Pragmatism. For James, who embraced Darwinism, the problem was not materialism’s past, but its future. Physics foretold a future in which all life would eventually die out and all traces of human activity would disappear: ‘Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an echo; without a memory … This utter final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood.’ James hoped for something more, including a different ending to the cosmic story. For his inchoate hoping and his defence of the right to keep hold of such hopes, James is roundly criticised and sometimes ridiculed. James hoped where Nagel insists, but insistence here is hollow.
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