"The idealist tradition, including contemporary phenomenology, has of course admitted subjective points of view as basic and has gone to the opposite length of denying an irreducible objective reality. … I find the idealist solution unacceptable …: objective reality cannot be analyzed or shut out of existence any more than subjective reality can. Even if not everything is something from no point of view, some things are.The deep source of both idealism and its objectifying opposite is the same: a conviction that a single world cannot contain both irreducible points of view and irreducible objective reality — that one of them must be what there really is and the other somehow reducible or dependent on it. This is a very powerful idea. To deny it is in a sense to deny that there is a single world."
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Atheists from the United StatesAcademics from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesHarvard University alumniCornell University alumni
Original Language: English
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"Subjective and Objective" (1979), p. 212.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel
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Thomas Nagel
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