Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.
Thomas NagelRead
It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote challenges the notion that life was formed purely by random accidents and natural selection, suggesting a need for a more credible explanation.
In this quote, Thomas Nagel critiques the widely accepted scientific view that life emerged through chance events and natural selection. He argues that this perspective is overly simplistic and lacks a compelling argument for its validity. Instead, he calls for an alternative schema that could offer a more profound understanding of life's origins, indicating that the current explanations do not account for the complexities of existence.
Themes
LifePhilosophyExistenceUnderstandingExplanation
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the origins of life during a philosophy class.
More from Thomas Nagel
All quotes →To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.
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There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
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Altruism itself depends on a recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.
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Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.
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The external view [of agency] forces itself on us at the same time that we resist it. One way this occurs is through the gradual erosion of what we do by the subtraction of what happens.
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