The View from Nowhere

The View from Nowhere is a book by philosopher Thomas Nagel. Published by Oxford University Press in 1986, it contrasts passive and active points of view in how humanity interacts with the world, relying either on a subjective perspective that reflects a point of view or an objective perspective that takes a more detached perspective.[1] Nagel describes the objective perspective as the "view from nowhere", one where the only valuable ideas are ones derived independently.[2]

This article is about the book by philosopher Thomas Nagel. For the term in journalism, see View from nowhere.

Reception

Historian Peter Gay praised The View from Nowhere.[3] Philosopher Thomas Metzinger praised and criticized the book's central concept as "beautiful" but untenable.[4]

gollark: It isn't a very good case.
gollark: They had designed ARM CPUs for ages for their phones. Recently they got good enough and/or Intel annoyed them enough that they switched over.
gollark: ARM is an instruction set. "Traditional CPU[s]" use the x86 instruction set. People argue a lot over which design is best but broadly speaking there doesn't seem to be *that* much difference, although x86 has some advantages like I think greater code density and downsides like variable length instructions being annoying to decode.
gollark: That's not a very valid comparison. But Apple's cores are somewhat better than available x86 ones.
gollark: Apparently they did lose most of their CPU design team to some other company recently, so who knows.

References
  1. Colin McGinn: Minds and Bodies : Philosophers and Their Ideas: Philosophers and Their Ideas. Oxford University Press, 1997.
  2. Alan Thomas: Thomas Nagel. Routledge, Jan 28, 2015.
  3. Gay, Peter (1990). Reading Freud: Explorations & Entertainments. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. p. 186. ISBN 0-300-05127-1.
  4. Thomas Metzinger (2003). Being No One: The Self-model Theory of Subjectivity. MIT Press. p. 582. ISBN 0-262-13417-9. But when Thomas Nagel developed the beautiful philosophical vision of the View from Nowhere he was not selfless at all. If Nagel had ever truly viewed the world from nowhere, then he would not have had any autobiographical memory referring to this episode.


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