{"product_id":"what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bat-hardcover","title":"What Is It Like to Be a Bat? - Hardcover","description":"\u003cstrong\u003eA 50th anniversary edition of one of the most widely influential articles of 20th Century philosophy\u003c\/strong\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.\" So begins Thomas Nagel's classic 1974 essay \"What is it Like to be a Bat?\" Nagel's essay initiated the now widespread attention to consciousness as a central problem for philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience; it also influenced the recognition of the consciousness of nonhuman creatures as an important subject of study. Nagel argued that the essential subjectivity of conscious experience--what it is like for the creature undergoing it--means that reductionist theories of mind, which attempt to analyze it in physical terms, can never succeed. It follows that the physical sciences cannot provide a complete description of reality, and that the physical conception of objective reality must be transcended if science is going to comprehend the mind. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThis edition reissues this classic and widely influential article on its 50th anniversary, along with a new preface discussing the origins and influence of the essay, as well as \"Further Thoughts: The Psychophysical Nexus,\" a supplementary essay which describes Nagel's later thoughts about how to respond to the problem posed by \"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?\" This second essay suggests that the most promising path forward for the mind-body problem, if one accepts the irreducible subjectivity of consciousness, is to seek a necessary connection between mental and neurophysiogical states through a more fundamental type of state which is neither mental nor physical but necessitates them both as essential aspects. In other words, a state that is physical from the outside and mental from the inside, just as we are. This would be a form of monism, requiring the formation of new concepts, since our present concepts of the mental and the physical do not entail such a necessary connection. The essay explains why the relation between the mental and the physical may be necessary, even though our present concepts make it appear contingent.","brand":"Oxford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46837904113820,"sku":"9780197752791","price":20.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0712\/7616\/7324\/files\/9780197752791.jpg?v=1778490679","url":"https:\/\/bronzeandbrass.store\/products\/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bat-hardcover","provider":"Bronze \u0026 Brass","version":"1.0","type":"link"}