The View From the Centre: Recovering Nagel's Objective Self

ABSTRACT Thomas Nagel highlighted a puzzle in accommodating the subjective fact that I am TN within an objective, centerless conception of reality. He rejected the “semantic diagnosis,” which treats “I” as an indexical as trivial, and proposed instead the concept of the “objective self.” In this paper, I do two things: first, I defend the semantic diagnosis against Nagel's objections; second, I vindicate Nagel's positive proposal involving the objective self by demonstrating that it is not a genuine alternative to the semantic diagnosis but is recoverable from within a Lewisian centered‐worlds version of it. I show how the Lewisian framework, through factorizing centered content into objective, and subjective components provides the conceptual resources to model the phenomenology of first‐person thought Nagel describes.