Sadler's Lectures
Sadler's Lectures
Lectures on classic and contemporary philosophical texts and thinkers by Gregory B. Sadler
Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like To Be A Bat? - Deceptive Clarity In Identification - Sadler's Lectures
14 minutes Posted Jun 20, 2026 at 8:49 pm.
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This lecture discusses the 20th century Analytic philosopher, Thomas Nagel's essay "What Is It Like To Be A Bat", and focuses upon one of the key points Nagel makes in his criticisms of reductionist projects aimed at explaining mind entirely in physical terms, namely that in order to make the deceptively clear "is" or "are" involved in those putative identifications make sense, what is required is some sort of coherent and robust theoretical scheme explaining how the mental can be reduced to the physical. At the present time, that simply isn't available to us, so those sorts of identifications amount to hand-waving.
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