Thomas Nagel, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.1 Three explananda mark the failure: phenomenal consciousness (which the bat thesis already showed physicalism cannot capture); cognition, in the sense of the capacity to reason and arrive at justified beliefs about a world that includes the structure of reasoning itself (which neo-Darwinism can at most explain instrumentally, not as the reliable access to truth that we have); and value, in the sense of the objective features of states of affairs that give us reason to act (which neo-Darwinism reduces to evolutionary adaptation, missing what value is).23
The current materialist worldview, which extends Darwinian explanation to all domains of natural and human reality, is overreaching its proper domain. A teleological natural framework — natural laws that make the development of consciousness, cognition, and value not an accident but a feature of how nature unfolds — is a serious alternative that deserves consideration.
The proposal is preliminary, not a worked-out replacement; the central aim of Mind and Cosmos is to show why the materialist orthodoxy is inadequate, and to gesture at what must replace it. The work is "deliberately reactionary" against the universal-acid Darwinism that Dennett and others have extended into philosophy of mind, ethics, and meta-philosophy.
The position is not theistic — Mind and Cosmos explicitly rejects Intelligent Design's appeal to a divine designer while accepting that the orthodox materialist alternative fails on its own terms.4
So if mind isa product of biological evolution—if organisms with mental life are not miraculous anomalies but an integral part of nature—then biology cannot be a purely physical science. The possibility opens up of a pervasive conception of the natural order very different from materialism— one that makes mind central, rather thana side effect of physical law.Mind and Cosmos, pp. 26–27
'That would require only that the existence of DNA be a physical possibility—in chemical space, so to speak. And if we extend the case to consciousness and reason, it would require that conscious and rational subjects supported by brains of the right kind be mental possibilities.Mind and Cosmos, pp. 106–108
'This, then, is what a theory of everything has to explain: not only the emergence from a lifeless universe of reproducing organisms and their development by evolution to 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…Mind and Cosmos, pp. 96–97
'The conclusion they invite is that there are some things that the physical sciences alone cannot fully account for. Other forms of understanding may be needed, or perhaps there is more to reality than even the most fully developed physics can describe.Mind and Cosmos, pp. 25–26
Mind and Cosmos (2012) is the most controversial book of Nagel's career and was attacked sharply by mainstream Darwinian-materialist philosophers (Leiter and Weisberg's review in The Nation called it a "remarkable failure"; Pinker called it "the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker"). Sympathetic readers were rarer; some Catholic and religious philosophers (Plantinga, Feser) saw it as a partial ally despite Nagel's own atheism. Intelligent Design advocates tried to claim Nagel as an ally in the public-school controversy that "Public Education and Intelligent Design" (2008) had already engaged; Nagel rejected the claim. The book's central position remains live but isolated; mainstream philosophy of mind and biology have not engaged with the teleological proposal seriously, and Nagel himself characterized the work as preliminary and exploratory.