Thomas Nagel

American moral and political theorist. Born in the former Yugoslavia, Nagel was educated at Cornell, Oxford, and Harvard. He taught at Princeton from 1966 to 1980, and subsequently at New York University. His work is centrally concerned with the nature of moral motivation and the possibility of a rational theory of moral and political commitment, and has been a major stimulus to interest in realistic and Kantian approaches to these issues. One of the most discussed papers of modern philosophy …