University Professor and professor of philosophy and law at New York University, Thomas Nagel has played a major role in the philosophical and biological debate on subjectivity and consciousness for a quarter century. He is also widely respected for his work in political philosophy, ethics, and epistemology. His argument has consistently been that science, which seeks an objective description of nature, cannot plumb the subjective experience of consciousness because consciousness cannot be reduced to either physical brain activity or behavior. In recent works, he has explored the tension between reason’s universality and evolution’s local explanations and shown how deeply embedded morality is in reason. Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Dr. Nagel came to the United States with his family before World War II, received his first baccalaureate degree from Cornell University, and continued his studies at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, taking a B.Phil. in 1960. He was awarded a Ph.D. in philosophy by Harvard University in 1963. He began his teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley, went on to Princeton as an assistant professor of philosophy in 1966, and was named a professor in 1972, a post he held for eight years until he joined the philosophy faculty at NYU and subsequently became a member of the law faculty as well. Dr. Nagel chaired the university’s philosophy department for nearly twenty years. He has been a visiting professor at Rockefeller University, the University of Pittsburgh, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the University of Witwatersand, the University of California, Los Angeles, All Souls College, Oxford, and Berkeley. He has delivered named lectures at Stanford, Oxford, Berkeley, The Johns Hopkins University, Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Fellowship, and fellowships from National Endowment for the Humanities, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi. Dr. Nagel previously served as associate editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, and he has published some sixty-five articles in scholarly journals, including his famous 1974 essay in the Philosophical Review, “What is it like to be a bat?,” in which he asserts that what we can’t know about the consciousness of other forms of life reveals the irreducibly subjective character of experience. He has published ten books, which have been translated into twenty-four languages. Among them are The Possibility of Altruism (1970), Mortal Questions (1979), The View from Nowhere (1986), Equality and Partiality (1991), The Last Word (1997), and, most recently, Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays, which was published in 2002 by Oxford University Press.