Subjectivity in Analytic Philosophy
In contemporary analytic philosophy, the issue of subject—and more specifically the "point of view" of the subject, or "subjectivity" -- has received attention as one of the major intractable problems in philosophy of mind (a related issue being the mind-body problem). In the essay What is it like to be a bat?, Thomas Nagel famously argued that explaining subjective experience—the "what it is like" to be something—is currently beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, because scientific understanding by definition requires an objective perspective, which, according to Nagel, is diametrically opposed to the subjective first-person point of view. These additional features of subjective experience are often referred to as qualia (see Frank Cameron Jackson and Mary's room).
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