Mortal Questions
Thomas Nagel, a longtime professor of philosophy and law at NYU, gathered fourteen essays for Mortal Questions, originally published by Cambridge in 1979. The collection includes Death, The Absurd, Moral Luck, and What Is It Like to Be a Bat, the paper that made the irreducibility of subjective experience a central question in philosophy of mind. Nagel writes with unusual clarity for a working philosopher, taking on hard questions about how to live and how to think about the mind without retreating into jargon. The essays are short, self-contained, and aimed at readers who want serious philosophy without a textbook around it. The book has stayed in print for more than forty years and continues to be assigned in undergraduate courses.
What you might want to know about Mortal Questions
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Thomas Nagel collects essays on death, absurdity, sexual ethics, war, and the nature of consciousness, including his famous paper on what it is like to be a bat.
Harris included Mortal Questions on his Tim Ferriss reading list and has cited Nagel's essay on consciousness as a defining argument about the limits of a purely third-person view of the mind.
No. The essays are independent, so most readers start with What Is It Like to Be a Bat, Death, or The Absurd and move around from there.
Mortal Questions was written by Thomas Nagel, published in 1979 by Cambridge University Press.
Mortal Questions is 226 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Mortal Questions takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
Mortal Questions is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
