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Books

The Last Word by Thomas Nagel

Antony Flew cheers an attack on relativism by Thomas Nagel.

The substance of works by Thomas Nagel is always matter which matters. This latest book is a sustained polemic against subjectivist relativism: a disastrous doctrine nowadays so widely accepted that “Claims that something is, without relativistic qualification, true or false, right or wrong, good or bad, risk being derided as expressions of a parochial perspective or form of life …” It is derided “not as a preliminary to showing that they are mistaken whereas something else is right, but as a way of showing that nothing is right, and that instead we are all expressing our personal or cultural points of view.”

This is a doctrine which is extremely attractive to all those who feel a need to discredit intellectually formidable criticism but who are unable or unwilling to meet and defeat that criticism in a fair intellectual fight. “The actual result” of the pervasive spread of this doctrine has been “a growth in the already extreme laziness of contemporary culture and the collapse of serious argument throughout the lower reaches of the humanities and social sciences…”

So what is to be done? The answer, like so much else in philosophy, is simple and obvious – simple and obvious, that is, once but only once someone has clearly and forcefully pointed the way to that answer. For obviousness truly is, what so much else is falsely said to be, essentially relative.

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