Maggie's Farm

"Thomas Nagel's article "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" is undoubtedly one of the most important pieces of philosophical work completed in the last fifty years. "

That is from What is it like to be a man? A quote:

A conviction in physicalism, and the possibility of science fully explaining conscious experience in the future, is extraordinarily widespread among contemporary philosophers, almost to the point of constituting a professional creed (though there are some notable exceptions).  Implicit in this position is the deeper conviction that for conscious experience to be truly understood – for anything to be truly understood – it must be understood scientifically, that to understand a thing in an essential way is to understand it scientifically.  Such an attitude is bound up with that common belief among modern philosophers, traceable to the logical positivists, that their discipline is merely an auxiliary to the more fundamental work of the sciences, a belief adequately summarized by Jerry Fodor as “the world picture that the natural sciences have a sort of priority…to which other discourse is required to defer insofar as it purports to speak literal truth.”

Nagel's essay is a critique of reductionism. Here is Nagel's famous essay.