Volume 45, Number 18 · November 19, 1998
The End of Explanation?
By Bernard Williams
The Last Word
by Thomas Nagel
Oxford University Press, 147 pp., $19.95
This is the question Thomas Nagel raises in The Last Word, and the answer he gives in his subtle, compact, and forceful book is firmly and eloquently of the first kind—a 'rationalist' answer, as against answers that he variously calls 'subjectivist,' 'relativist,' and 'naturalist.' We, most of us, have a moral outlook which is (very broadly speaking) liberal: we support universal human rights and are in favor of toleration. Others, elsewhere, do not have that outlook, and neither did most people in the past. We favor the medicine of medical practice over the medicine of medicine men, and think that we have scientific reasons to do so; medicine men have a different view. Nagel wants to vindicate our rationality, and the justifications that we offer for our beliefs, against people who say that these ways of thinking are simply the ones that we are culturally used to and happen to favor.
Review, 7838 words
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