Mortal Questions is Thomas Nagel's 1979 collection of fourteen essays on death, consciousness, freedom, equality, war and sexual ethics, reissued in Cambridge's Canto Classics series. Nagel writes for the general reader rather than the specialist: each essay takes a concrete moral or political worry and pushes it toward a philosophical problem underneath. It sits with the accessible end of analytic philosophy, closer to Nagel's own What Does It All Mean? than to a dense treatise, and it is the book that contains his well-known essay on what it is like to be a bat. Readers rate it highly and treat it as a durable introduction to Nagel's thinking.
In stockReturn policy
Reviewers rate the collection highly and single out its clarity and the bat essay. Many describe it as a strong first encounter with Nagel and with analytic philosophy generally. Some find individual essays uneven or tied to debates of their time.
Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel explores fundamental issues about the meaning, nature and value of human life. It takes up questions about our attitudes to death, sexual behavior, social inequality, war and political power.
These questions lead to more clearly philosophical problems about personal identity, consciousness, freedom and value. The book aims at an understanding that is both theoretical and personal, and it engages with what are literally issues of life and death.
