Shana asked:

Hi. I'm a freshman in college and have to write an essay 4-5 pages for the end of the year. My class is
called Knowledge and Reality; basically introduction to philosophy. My paper is supposed to compare
Thomas Nagel and Plato's philosophies. Plato's included theories are from Phaedoand the Apology.
Could you give me some help on what Nagel thought. He really confuses me.

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Both Plato and Nagel could be described as holding two worldtheories of reality.

For Plato, the two worlds of sense experience and the immaterial 'Forms' or 'Ideas' correspond to two
different modes of understanding. The world of sense experience, of sights and sounds, is a world
where nothing remains constant and true knowledge is impossible. There can be no true science of
empirical reality, only more or less well founded opinions. In stark contrast, the object of philosophical
inquiry is the timeless world of 'Forms', such as the Form of Justice, or Virtue. Forms are the objects
of intellectual vision.

The best source for Nagel's views is his book The View From Nowhere(Oxford 1986). Nagel's theory
may be seen as a reaction to a view first expressed by Plato's predecessors, the Greek atomists
Leucippus and Democritus. According to the atomists, our familiar world of sights and sounds is
illusory, not for the reasons Plato gave but because all that really exists is physical atoms and the
void. The smell of a rose, the blue of the sky, the deepest passions of love are just mechanical
movements of atoms. What the atomists stumbled across was the idea of the objective standpoint.
This is what Nagel calls the 'view from nowhere'.

Modern science upholds the fundamental logical assumptions of the atomist theory, even though the
basic elements are no longer simple inpenetrable nuggets of matter but more mysterious entities
such as muons and quarks. The basic idea is still the same. The external view tells the complete
story of what we are. Everything that happens in the universe is ultimately a physical process of
cause and effect. We are nothing but tiny clumps of matter pushed here and there by forces outside
of our control.

Nagel's response to this picture is to deny that such a conception could ever fully replace the view we
have of ourselves, as agents who possess consciousness, who experience colours, sounds, smells,
tastes, who make decisions and act out of our own free will, who perceive a world imbued with
purpose and value. All these aspects of the subjective standpointare incapable of being reduced to
statements about the world conceived from the objective standpoint. The result is that our vision of
the world and ourselves involves an irreconcilable duality.

I think what Nagel would say to Plato, if the two philosophers ever chanced to meet in the afterlife, is
that Plato should not have been so quick to despise the world of sights and sounds. What Plato would
say to Nagel is that Nagel's failure to find values in the world viewed from the objective standpoint is
the result of failing to take a sufficiently distanced view of the physical world. On a truly objective
view, values — the Form of the Good and all the other Forms arranged below it — are the most real
thing.

Geoffrey Klempner