This seems more targeted to a highschool crowd who haven't engaged with philosophy at all. It's pedagogically laid out as a journey through most common philosophical topics from how we can know anything at all to theories about life and death. ( )

𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐬 𝐍𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐥 - 𝐔𝐧𝐚 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐚 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐳𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐚 𝐟𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐨𝐟𝐢𝐚
Ho “incontrato” Nagel per la prima volta nel 1987 mentre leggevo un altro libro davvero bellissimo: L’io della mente curato da Duglas R. Hofstadter e Daniel C. Dennet. I testi del libro ruotavano tutti intorno a un unico tema: la coscienza. Nagel era presente con un articolo dal titolo curioso: Cosa si prova ad essere un pipistrello?
In questa introduzione provocatoriamente brevissima alla filosofia, Nagel affronta con un linguaggio semplicissimo vari temi fondamentali, anzi, I Temi: la coscienza di se e degli altri, il pensiero, la consapevolezza, la giustizia, la morte, il senso della vita.
Non è un manuale, non ci si trovano risposte, non si trova alcun riferimento ai grandi del pensiero.
È un libro che potrebbe essere letto in tram o in aereo sollevando ogni tanto lo sguardo a riflettere su proprio se riflesso nel finestrino.

A great, brief introduction to different philosophical ideas. ( )

You want I should tell you what it all means, now that I finished the book? So, if I did, you could then say, "That's it? Why should I care?" Or "What does it mean that that's what it all means?" In other words, a meaning found in a book is just a meaning found in a book. That's not a fault of the book, though. Nagel gives this very argument.

I'll admit I went into this less naive than the intended audience. It was written for people who never asked these questions in the first place. I couldn't tell you whether one of those people would find this book a wake-up call to the examined life. The fact that they picked it up in the first place would mean they were already primed for it. This, by the way, is the core of what I call the Goodread's Paradox: the distortion in ratings caused by the fact that readers aren't reviewing at random but are evaluating just those books toward which they are already disposed to find interesting. Someone picking up Nagel and expecting a romantic comedy would give it only 1 star.

And, indeed, my only real complaint about the book is that Nagel doesn't sufficiently question what he is reading into to his observations. Yes, he treats the topics of solipsism and materialism but he doesn't ask whether those topics themselves reflect a bias that could, if not be escaped, at least be seen as an inescapable bias for him (though perhaps not for someone else with different inescapable biases) and whether the self is just that, a bias, which keeps one from a "view from nowhere" (a book of his I promise to return to.) ( )

Major philosophical questions in a nutshell, just in case you did not formulate them quite like that yourself. One could spend years thinking and discussing any and each of them, but here they are introduced in a very simple, natural and partly entertaining way, for us to do as we please and chew on them intermittently. ( )