“... for which all is dark inside’? This form of question – ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ Thomas Nagel asked in a hugely influential paper in 1974 – is philosophical shorthand for asking whether a creature is conscious. Many philosophers think consciousness is an all or nothing phenomenon: you either have it or you don’t. Humans have it, as ...”

“... of his reputation. In 1929, on his 70th birthday, he received a Festschrift, with tributes from Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Musil, Schoenberg, Herman Hesse, Gorky, the first President of Czechoslovakia, Tomás Masaryk, and Gide. Five years later, in 1934, he received tributes only from Goebbels and from a crowd of lesser German writers who are now forgotten ...”

“... or no danger to the country. If asked, in fact, they would probably agree with the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who has said that you cannot trust a person who never lies about sex. The case against Clinton was also doomed by pervasive hypocrisy. The media that thrives on sex and violence postured shamelessly as Clinton’s moral judge. Some ...”

“... stigma of his politics will one day be separated from his writing, which I regard very highly,’ Thomas Mann said in 1955, but when asked to support the setting up of a Knut Hamsun Society in Germany he replied that ‘the wretched, and really wicked things he constantly said, wrote and did are too fresh in my mind.’ The idea of the society was in one ...”

“... Unusual too in a moral philosopher, Williams did not seek to have the Last Word. Writing about Thomas Nagel’s book of that name, he couldn’t but agree that there comes a point at which we have to accept that to encourage thinking locally or ‘thickly’ about ethics, thinking about what the options are for us ‘now and around here’, rests on a ...”

“... in Britain and America, and exemplified by even such relatively liberated analytic philosophers as Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams) contrasts ‘hard scientific fact’ with ‘the subjective’ or with ‘metaphor’, the second kind – common elsewhere in the world – sees science as one more human activity, not as the place at which human beings ...”

“... think that we are entitled to do what we want with such restricted life-forms. Costello mentions Thomas Nagel’s famous paper about the impossibility of thinking ourselves into the mind of a bat. At the same time she says that she has imagined what it means to be a corpse. ‘All of us have such moments, particularly as we grow older. The knowledge we ...”

“... for the kindness and helpfulness he has always shown them. In a brief tribute written in 1972, Thomas Hess, a champion of post-war art, who was close to Schapiro, described him as having been a friend to the New York pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, a hero to the second generation, and to the third wave ‘a more distant figure, a professor, a ...”

“... of his death, Glenn Gould had become the subject of a novel, Der Untergeher by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Der Untergeher (literally ‘the sinker’ or ‘the one who goes, or is destined to go, under’ – perhaps ‘the loser’) describes the impact of Gould’s playing and personality on two exceptionally talented young Austrian pianists, who ...”