Quick Answer
An atheist philosopher of the first rank argues that materialism cannot explain consciousness, proposes a purpose built into nature with no designer behind it, and was treated as a heretic for the second half of that sentence. The negative argument is mainstream. The positive proposal is thin. Separating them is the whole job of reading this book.
Key Takeaways
- Nagel is an atheist and rejects both theism and intelligent design as explanations, which did not protect him.
- The negative case is respectable. That physical description leaves subjective experience out is a widely held position, and Nagel wrote its founding paper in 1974.
- The positive case is underdeveloped. Natural teleology is asserted, not worked out, and it is unclear what would count as evidence for it.
- The reception was extraordinary. The Guardian called it the most despised science book of 2012.
- It is short and clear, around 130 pages of plain prose, and readable in an afternoon.
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What the Book Argues
Oxford University Press published Mind and Cosmos in 2012, subtitled Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. It runs to about 130 pages.
Thomas Nagel, born in 1937, taught philosophy and law at New York University and is one of the most distinguished analytic philosophers of the past half century. This is not a book by an outsider or a crank, which is part of why it caused what it caused.
The argument in outline. The dominant scientific picture holds that everything, including mind, is ultimately explicable in physical terms, with the emergence of life and consciousness accounted for by chemistry and natural selection. Nagel argues that this picture cannot in principle accommodate three things: conscious experience, our capacity to reason toward objective truth, and value. Since those things exist, the picture is incomplete, and completing it will require something the current framework does not contain.
On the subtitle: it is combative and it cost him. Almost certainly false is a strong claim, and a great deal of the hostility that followed attached to the framing rather than to the argument inside. A book making the same case under a milder title would have been received as a contribution rather than an attack.
The Paper Behind It
The book assumes an argument Nagel made in 1974, and readers who do not know it will find the opening chapters abrupt.
"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is among the most cited papers in modern philosophy. Its move is simple. A bat navigates by echolocation, a sensory mode humans do not have. We can learn everything physical about bat neurology, and we still will not know what it is like to be one, because what it is like is a fact accessible from a point of view and physical description is precisely the removal of points of view.
Nagel's conclusion was not that consciousness is supernatural. It was that objective physical description systematically leaves out a real feature of the world, and that we do not currently have any idea how to include it.
That paper is standard reading in every philosophy of mind course. Its author became, thirty-eight years later, the man who wrote the most despised science book of the year by extending its argument.
Three Things That Resist Explanation
Consciousness. The core case, developed from the bat paper. Physical explanation works by describing structure and function from outside. Subjective experience is not a structure or a function; it is what something is like from within. Nagel's claim is that no amount of additional detail about neurons closes that gap, because the gap is not a gap in detail.
Reason. The second argument is less familiar and more interesting. Our cognitive faculties evolved because they helped ancestors survive. But we use them to reach conclusions in mathematics, cosmology and ethics that have no conceivable survival relevance, and we take those conclusions to be objectively true. Nagel argues that a purely adaptive account of the origin of reason undercuts our confidence in reason's ability to reach truth beyond the adaptive.
Value. The third is that moral realism, the position that some things are genuinely good or bad rather than merely felt to be, sits badly with a picture in which our evaluative responses are dispositions selected for reproductive advantage. Nagel is a moral realist and takes this to be a problem for the standard picture rather than for moral realism.
The three arguments are not equally strong and reviewers have differed on which is best. The consciousness argument is the one with a long literature behind it and the most defenders. The argument from reason is the most original in the book and the most likely to be underestimated, since versions of it have been made by writers as different as C. S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga and it has never been cleanly answered. The argument from value depends on accepting moral realism first, which many readers will not.
The Argument About Reason, in Full
The second of the three arguments is the one most reviewers passed over quickly, and it deserves setting out properly because it is the most original thing in the book.
Start with what natural selection can explain. A creature whose perceptual and inferential systems track its environment reliably will out-survive one whose systems do not. So selection has an obvious grip on ordinary practical cognition: recognising a predator, judging a distance, inferring that the fruit is where the birds are.
Now consider what those same faculties are used for. Set theory. The age of the universe. The behaviour of objects at scales no ancestor encountered. Whether an action is wrong when nobody will discover it. In each case we take ourselves to be reaching conclusions that are true, and true independently of us.
Nagel's question is what licenses that confidence. A faculty selected for tracking mid-sized objects on an African plain has been extended into domains where it confers no reproductive benefit whatever, and we are treating its outputs there as objectively valid. On a strictly adaptive account of where the faculty came from, that extension needs a justification the account does not obviously supply.
The argument has a lineage. C. S. Lewis made a version of it in Miracles, and Alvin Plantinga developed a more technical form as the evolutionary argument against naturalism. Nagel arrives at similar territory from a completely different direction, as an atheist with no theistic conclusion in view, which makes his version harder to dismiss on motive.
The standard reply is that general-purpose reasoning is itself adaptive, that a mind capable of flexible inference will handle novel problems better than one with fixed routines, and that mathematics and cosmology are free riders on a capacity selected for other work. That reply is reasonable and it is not obviously complete, because a free rider that reliably delivers truth about the very large and the very small still needs its reliability explained.
Notice what is unusual about this argument compared with the consciousness one. Consciousness is a phenomenon that resists explanation. Reason is a tool we are using to conduct the whole inquiry, including this one. If the adaptive account undercuts confidence in reason, it undercuts confidence in the adaptive account, which was reached by reasoning. That self-referential quality is what makes the argument hard to set aside cleanly, and it is why versions of it keep reappearing across two centuries of otherwise unrelated philosophy.
Practice: separate the diagnosis from the cure
This book is a clean case of a habit worth acquiring generally. An argument has two halves: something is wrong with the standard view, and here is what should replace it. They are independent. The first can be right while the second is worthless, and dismissing the first because the second is weak is the most common error in public argument. Take any book you have rejected and check whether you rejected its diagnosis or only its cure. Most people find they threw out both because one was bad.
What He Is Not Saying
Nagel is an atheist. He states it in the book. He has written elsewhere, in a much-quoted passage, that he does not merely disbelieve in God but hopes there is no God and does not want the universe to be like that.
He rejects theistic explanation explicitly, on the grounds that it does not do the work he wants done. Invoking a mind outside nature to explain minds inside it relocates the problem rather than solving it, and Nagel wants an account in which consciousness is a natural feature of the world.
He also declines intelligent design as an answer while defending the design theorists' right to raise objections. His position is that some of their criticisms of the standard account deserve responses rather than ridicule, and that their own explanation is not one he accepts.
That middle position satisfied nobody, which is roughly what a middle position in a polarised argument does.
Natural Teleology
Having argued that something is missing, Nagel proposes what it might be, and this is where the book gets into trouble.
His suggestion is teleological law: that the laws of nature may include a tendency toward the emergence of consciousness and value. Not a designer arranging outcomes, and not a supernatural intervention, but a bias in how nature works, such that the appearance of minds is written into the system rather than being an accident that a very large number of trials eventually produced.
He is careful to present this as a possibility worth exploring rather than a theory he has established. He does not say how it would operate, what it would predict, or how anyone might test it.
That caution is honest and it is also the problem. A proposal with no specified content and no observable consequences is not yet a scientific hypothesis, and the criticism that Nagel has described a shape where an explanation should be is fair.
Why Emergence Does Not Settle It
The most common response a general reader gives to Nagel is that consciousness is an emergent property, and it is worth explaining why he does not think that answers him.
Emergence is a real and respectable idea. Water is wet and hydrogen and oxygen are not. A traffic jam has properties no individual car has. Complex systems routinely display behaviour that is not present in their parts and that could not have been predicted from studying the parts alone.
Nagel's reply is that these are all cases of one kind. In every standard example, the emergent property is a pattern in the arrangement or behaviour of the parts, describable from outside, in principle derivable once the interactions are understood. Wetness is a fact about how molecules move together, available to any observer with sufficient information.
Consciousness, on his account, is not that kind of property. It is not a pattern observable from outside; it is the existence of an inside. Saying it emerges from complexity names the point at which it appears without explaining how arranging things that have no inside produces something that does.
Critics answer that this simply restates the difficulty and calls it a barrier, and that emergence in the strong sense is exactly what we should expect not to be able to imagine in advance. That exchange is where the argument has sat for thirty years. What can be said fairly is that invoking emergence is a promissory note rather than an explanation, and a reader reaching for it should know they are naming the problem rather than dissolving it.
The Reception
The response was severe enough to become a story in its own right.
Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg reviewed the book in The Nation and called it an instrument of mischief. Steven Pinker, responding to that review, described it publicly as the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker. Daniel Dennett and Elliott Sober were among the other critics. The Guardian named it the most despised science book of 2012.
Andrew Ferguson then wrote a long piece in the Weekly Standard called "The Heretic", describing the pile-on and asking why a short book by an elderly atheist philosopher had produced that volume of anger.
The intensity is the interesting part, and it is worth being fair about its causes rather than treating it as pure tribalism. Nagel's subtitle attacked a framework many scientists regard as under political assault from creationists, and a distinguished philosopher lending apparent support to that attack was, in context, genuinely damaging regardless of his intentions. Critics who said the book would be used by people Nagel disagrees with were correct; it was. That does not make the arguments wrong, and it explains why they were met with something other than argument.
Which Criticisms Land
Setting the temperature aside, several objections are substantial.
The biology is thin. Nagel criticises evolutionary explanation without engaging closely with current work on the origin of life or on the evolution of cognition. For a book asserting that a scientific framework is almost certainly false, the engagement with that framework is light.
The teleology is not cashed out. Michael Chorost, among others, noted that Nagel does not engage with the existing scientific literature that bears on teleological questions, including work on self-organisation and emergence. He asserts a gap and names something that might fill it, without connecting to people already working there.
The argument from what we cannot currently imagine. Several critics argued that Nagel moves from we have no idea how physical processes could produce consciousness to physical processes cannot produce consciousness, and that the first does not license the second. Explanatory gaps have closed before.
Against that last one, Nagel's defenders reply that the consciousness case differs in kind from previous gaps, since what is missing is not a mechanism but an account of how any mechanism could yield a point of view. That reply is where the argument actually sits, and it has not been settled.
What Survives
Strip the subtitle, the teleology and the noise, and a real position remains.
The claim that reductive physicalism has not explained conscious experience is not fringe. It is held, in various forms, by a substantial portion of working philosophers of mind, including many with no interest in teleology and no sympathy for anything in the second half of this book. David Chalmers named the problem, and the literature around it is enormous and serious.
The live options among philosophers who accept the negative argument include panpsychism, which makes experience a basic feature of matter, various forms of dual-aspect theory, and idealist positions. Our second piece on panpsychism covers the position most often reached for by people who find Nagel's diagnosis convincing and his prescription unusable.
What Nagel adds to that conversation is mainly nerve. He is willing to say in public that the standard picture has a hole in it, from a position where he has nothing to gain and, as it turned out, a reputation to lose.
Who Should Read It
Read the bat paper first. It is twenty pages, freely available, and the book assumes it.
Read this if you want a first-rank philosopher stating plainly what current science has and has not explained about mind, in language a non-specialist can follow.
Read a hostile review afterwards. The Leiter and Weisberg piece is the standard one, and reading it against the book is a good exercise in judging an argument against its reception.
Do not read it as science. It is philosophy about science, the biology in it is light, and it will not tell you anything about evolutionary theory you could not get better elsewhere.
Our position: half a good book, and the good half is genuinely good. Nagel is right that consciousness has not been explained and right that saying so is not superstition. He is not persuasive that a teleological bias in natural law is the answer, and he does not do the work that would make it a proposal rather than a placeholder. Read it for the diagnosis, hold the prescription loosely, and notice how much of the response addressed the subtitle rather than the argument.
For adjacent reading, see Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for the classical treatment of what the knowing mind contributes to what is known, and our overview of consciousness for the wider field.
Thirty pages of diagnosis worth more than the controversy around them.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Mind and Cosmos about?
Thomas Nagel's 2012 argument that reductive materialism cannot account for consciousness, for our capacity to reach objective truth, or for value, and that a complete account of nature will therefore need something the current framework does not contain. He proposes a natural teleology as the missing element.
Is Nagel religious?
No. He is an atheist and says so directly in the book, and he has written elsewhere that he does not want there to be a God. He explicitly rejects theistic explanation and intelligent design as answers, while defending the legitimacy of some of the questions their proponents raise.
What is natural teleology?
Nagel's proposal that the laws of nature may include a bias toward the emergence of consciousness and value, without any designer and without anything supernatural. It is the least developed part of the book and the part almost every critic rejects.
Why was the reception so hostile?
Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg called it an instrument of mischief in The Nation, Steven Pinker described it as the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker, and the Guardian named it the most despised science book of 2012. Daniel Dennett and Elliott Sober were among other critics.
Which part of the argument holds up?
The negative half. That reductive physicalism has not explained subjective experience is a mainstream position in philosophy of mind, held by many philosophers with no sympathy for anything Nagel proposes as a remedy. He wrote the founding paper of that discussion in 1974.
Which part does not hold up?
The positive proposal. Natural teleology is asserted rather than developed, it is not clear what it would predict or how it could be tested, and Nagel does not engage closely with the biology he is criticising. Even sympathetic readers have found this section thin.
What is the bat paper?
Nagel's 1974 article What Is It Like to Be a Bat, one of the most cited papers in modern philosophy. It argues that there is something it is like to be a conscious creature, that this subjective character is a real feature of the world, and that objective physical description leaves it out.
Does the book support intelligent design?
No, and Nagel says so. He argues that design proponents have identified real gaps and that their explanation is not acceptable, since invoking a designer is exactly the kind of answer he rejects. Critics still objected that the book would be used by others regardless of his intentions.
Is it hard to read?
It is short, around 130 pages, and clear. Nagel writes plain analytic prose without jargon. The arguments are compressed and the compression is the difficulty, since a great deal is asserted quickly that a longer book would have had to defend.
How does it relate to panpsychism?
Nagel takes panpsychism seriously as one of the options if materialism fails, and he does not commit to it. His teleological proposal is a different route to the same destination: making mind a basic feature of nature rather than a late accident.
Should I read it if I am not a philosopher?
Yes, with the reception in mind. It is one of the few accessible books by a first-rank philosopher stating plainly what current science has and has not explained about mind, and the controversy around it is as instructive as the argument.
What should I read alongside it?
Nagel's own bat paper first, since the book assumes it. Then a critical review such as the one by Leiter and Weisberg, and a work on panpsychism, which is the position most contemporary philosophers reach for when they take Nagel's negative argument seriously.
Ask what would change your mind
Nagel's book is a case study in what happens when a claim has no clear test attached to it. Before accepting or rejecting his teleology, write down what evidence would settle it either way. If you cannot name any, you have learned something important about the proposal, and the same exercise applied to your own convictions is uncomfortable in exactly the way it should be.
Sources & References
- Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press.
- Nagel, T. (1974). "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" The Philosophical Review 83:4.
- Nagel, T. (1986). The View from Nowhere. Oxford University Press.
- Leiter, B. and Weisberg, M. (2012). Review of Mind and Cosmos. The Nation.
- Ferguson, A. (2013). "The Heretic." The Weekly Standard, March 2013.
- Chorost, M. Commentary on Nagel and the literature on natural teleology.
- Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind. Oxford University Press.
- The Hedgehog Review. "The Nagel Flap: Mind and Cosmos." hedgehogreview.com.