Despite his aversion to theistic cosmology, Nagel explores with extraordinary precision and clarity the striking features of our human experience that don't seem to fit comfortably with the materialist world-picture. He is famous for an earlier article focusing on consciousness which pointed out that consciousness has an ineliminably subjective aspect-"what it is like" for the experiencing individual-which cannot be captured by even the most complete scientific account of the subject's brain and behaviour. To this he now adds a lot more. What needs to be explained, and what the current scientific consensus has trouble explaining, is "not only the emergence from a lifeless universe of reproducing organisms and their development by evolution to a greater and greater functional complexity; not only the consciousness of some of those organisms and its central role in their lives; but also the development of consciousness into an instrument of transcendence that can grasp objective reality and objective value".

Our mind is an "instrument of transcendence". To anyone familiar with the typical current philosophical landscape in the anglophone world, this is an amazing phrase to come out of the mouth of an analytic philosopher. Yet Nagel is not talking about immortal souls: he accepts that that the relevant mental processes are inseparable from the physical processes of the body and brain. But the purely physical nature of these processes doesn't settle the question of what kind of reality we gain access to when we use our brains and think about the world. And Nagel has the integrity to admit just how strange, from the point of view of modern materialist orthodoxy, that reality is. Our reason gives us access to "objective, mind-independent truths" which include the eternal and necessary truths of logic and mathematics, and the domain of objective moral truth. 

Those of us who learned philosophy in the sceptical, post-positivist world of the 1960s and '70s were taught to believe that moral truth was a sham, a mere projection of our passions and preferences. But since then there has been a decisive shift to objectivism about morality. Most philosophers have now come to accept the intuitively obvious view that there are genuine objective reasons that make it wrong to hurt someone gratuitously, and these reasons are not a mere function of self-interest or the imperatives of survival. Yet how can the purely mechanical processes of nature give rise to this remarkable human capacity to detect these objective moral truths? Nagel's brave conclusion is that the "conception of the natural order that made this possible must be expanded". Instead of the blind mechanical processes of the official neo-Darwinian story, we may have to take seriously the idea that the cosmos has an inherent teleology, some kind of inbuilt drive towards the emergence of consciousness, and eventually rational and moral awareness.

Does teleology, a tendency to move or unfold towards some goal, imply an intelligent designer? In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas argued just this in the fifth of his five "ways"  or proofs of God's existence: "things which don't have knowledge do not tend towards a goal unless they are guided by something with knowledge and intelligence, as an arrow is guided by the archer. Hence there is some intelligent being by whom all natural things are directed to their goal or end; and this we call ‘God'." But Nagel, ever averse to theism, is thinking of some purely naturalistic account that might do justice to the teleological tendency in things-though he admits we can only speculate about what form such an account might take.