DE Weekly: Nagel, Irony, & the Backward Step

“Most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, and some feel it vividly and continually. Yet the reasons usually offered in defense of this conviction are patently inadequate: they could not really explain why life is absurd. Why then do they provide a natural expression for the sense that it is?”

This is the opening paragraph of Thomas Nagel’s 1971 essay “The Absurd.” Nagel is an American philosopher and University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University. Among many other things, his body of work explores the philosophy of mind.