Concealment and Exposure: And Other Essays

by Thomas Nagel

Overview

Thomas Nagel is widely recognized as one of the top American philosophers working today. Reflecting the diversity of his many philosophical preoccupations, this volume is a collection of his most recent critical essays and reviews. The first section, Public and Private, focuses on the notion of privacy in the context of social and political issues, such as the impeachment of President Clinton. The second section, Right and Wrong, discusses moral, political and legal theory, and includes pieces on John Rawls, G.A. Cohen, and T.M. Scanlon, among others. The final section, Mind and Reality, features discussions of Richard Rorty, Donald Davidson, and the Sokal hoax, and closes with a substantial new essay on the mind-body problem. Written with characteristic rigor, these pieces reveal the intellectual passion underlying the incisive analysis for which Nagel is known.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190292645
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/14/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	919 KB

About the Author

Thomas Nagel is Professor of Philosophy and Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of 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, Other Minds: Critical Essays, 1969-1994, and The Last Word.

Table of Contents

Part I.	Public and Private
1.	Concealment and Exposure	3
2.	The Shredding of Public Privacy	27
3.	Personal Rights and Public Space	31
4.	Chastity	53
5.	Nussbaum on Sexual Injustice	56
6.	Bertrand Russell: A Public Life	63
Part II.	Right and Wrong
7.	The Writings of John Rawls	75
8.	Rawls and Liberalism	87
9.	Cohen on Inequality	107
10.	Justice and Nature	113
11.	Raz on Liberty and Law	134
12.	Waldron on Law and Politics	141
13.	Scanlon's Moral Theory	147
Part III.	Reality
14.	Rorty's Pragmatism	157
15.	The Sleep of Reason	163
16.	Davidson's New Cogito	175
17.	Stroud and the Quest for Reality	187
18.	The Psychophysical Nexus	194
	Index	237

Editorial Reviews

"[A] wonderful book. It is wonderful partly for the further excellent review articles that it adds to the Other Minds archive, and partly for the lively and accessible introduction it provides to Nagel's own thought and intellectual personality...[T]he essays in this volume, taken together, do more than any other philosophical writings known to me to bring out the complex and treacherous truth in the old maxim that the personal is political."—Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

From the Publisher