Thomas Nagel is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. He is the author of The View from Nowhere,
What Does It All Mean?, The Possibility of Altruism, Mortal Questions, Equality and Partiality, and Other Minds:
Critical Essays, 1969-1994.
Review
"...[a] subtle, compact, and forceful book....The Last Word is a work of philosophical reflection...a significant
contribution to the culture wars of our time."
--New York Review of Books
Oxford University Press Web Site, April, 2002
Summary
A timely and vigorous defense of reason from one of our leading philosophers.
If there is such a thing as reason, it has to be universal. Reason must reflect objective principles whose validity
is independent of our point of view--principles that anyone with enough intelligence ought to be able to recognize
as correct. But this generality of reason is what relativists and subjectivists deny in ever-increasing numbers.
And such subjectivism is not just an inconsequential intellectual flourish or badge of theoretical chic. It is
exploited to deflect argument and to belittle the pretensions of the arguments of others. The continuing spread
of this relativistic way of thinking threatens to make public discourse increasingly difficult and to exacerbate
the deep divisions of our society. In The Last Word, Thomas Nagel, one of the most influential philosophers writing
in English, presents a sustained defense of reason against the attacks of subjectivism, delivering systematic rebuttals
of relativistic claims with respect to language, logic, science, and ethics. He shows that the last word in disputes
about the objective validity of any form of thought must lie in some unqualified thoughts about how things are--thoughts
that we cannot regard from outside as mere psychological dispositions.
