TEHRAN – A Persian translation of American philosopher Thomas Nagel’s book “The Last Word” has recently been published by Now Publications in Tehran.

Javad Heidari is the translator of the book first released in 1997.

In this book, Nagel, one of the most influential philosophers writing in English, presents a sustained defense of reason against the attacks of subjectivism, delivering systematic rebuttals of relativistic claims with respect to language, logic, science, and ethics.

His work sets a new standard in the debate on this crucially important question and should generate intense interest both within and outside the philosophical community.

He asserts that reason, if it exists, must be universal. Reason must reflect objective principles whose validity is independent of our point of view--principles that anyone with enough intelligence ought to be able to recognize as correct. 

But this generality of reason is what relativists and subjectivists deny in ever-increasing numbers. And such subjectivism is not just an inconsequential intellectual flourish or badge of theoretical chic. It is exploited to deflect argument and to belittle the pretensions of the arguments of others. The continuing spread of this relativistic way of thinking threatens to make public discourse increasingly difficult and to exacerbate the deep divisions of our society.
Thomas Nagel was trained in philosophy, first at Cornell, then at Oxford, where he went on a Fulbright Scholarship, and then at Harvard. He has always worked in a wide range of areas of philosophy, but ethics and political and legal theory have been prominent among his concerns from the beginning. 

He has also written extensively about metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of mind, and the meaning of life. Nagel is interested in the direct application of moral theory to contemporary issues such as affirmative action, freedom of expression, and the laws of war, and he was one of the founding editors of the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, which had a significant effect in bringing those concerns into the philosophical main stream.

Nagel is the author of a number of books. Most of his interests are treated in “The View From Nowhere”, which explores the subjective/objective opposition in a number of areas of philosophy, from the mind-body problem and the theory of knowledge to free will, ethics, the meaning of life, and the significance of death. 

He is the recipient of a Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Balzan Prize in Moral Philosophy.

Photo: A combination photo shows Thomas Nagel and the front cover of the Persian edition of his book “The Last Word”

ABU/