Citation

Author Website

https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/thomas-nagel.html

Thread

Carolyn A. Ristau, Précis of: "Birds, Bats and Minds: Tales of a Revolutionary Scientist, Donald R. Griffin"

Abstract

Our discussions prompted Donald Griffin to campaign for the recognition of animal consciousness as a subject for scientific investigation. Ristau shows how much has since been discovered about the experiences of bats and other creatures, by Griffin and others, in spite of the limits to full knowledge imposed by our biological differences. But Ristau seriously misrepresents me as holding that we can know nothing about what it is like to be a bat, whereas these results are precisely of the kind I envisioned in proposing an “objective phenomenology.”

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Thomas Nagel is University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at New York University. He has written extensively about the subjective-objective distinction in philosophy of mind, ethics, political theory, and epistemology. Website

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1864