Part of philosophy’s concerns has always been with mortal life: how to understand it and how to live it. Nagel’s essays in Mortal Questions are about life: about its end, its meaning, its value, and about the metaphysics of consciousness. Questions about our attitudes towards death, sexual behavior, social inequality, war and political power are shown to lead to more traditional philosophical problems about personal identity, consciousness, freedom and value. Nagel's approach to these issues is to place more emphasis on problems over solutions, intuition over arguments, and pluralistic discord over systematic harmony. According to him, simplicity and elegance are never reasons to think that a philosophical theory is true. On the contrary, they are usually grounds for thinking it false.

Nagel’s focus is always on the arguments for and against the issues and not on dead philosophers. This original book aims at a form of understanding that is both theoretical and personal in its lively engagement with what are literally issues of life and death.

The book has 14 chapters and this SDG will cover two chapters per session for a total of 7 sessions.

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