Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel was trained in philosophy, first at Cornell (B.A. 1958), then at Oxford, where he went on a Fulbright Scholarship (B. Phil. 1960), and then at Harvard (Ph.D. 1963). He has always worked in a wide range of areas of philosophy, but ethics and political and legal theory have been prominent among his concerns from the beginning. He has also written extensively about metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of mind, and the meaning of life. Nagel is interested in the direct application of moral theory to contemporary issues such as abortion, affirmative action, freedom of expression, and the laws of war, and he was one of the founding editors of the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, which had a significant effect in bringing those concerns into the philosophical main stream.