The View from Nowhere

The View from Nowhere is a book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, published by Oxford University Press in 1986. It contrasts two ways of situating oneself toward the world: the subjective perspective, which reflects the particular point of view of the one who knows, and the objective perspective, which adopts a more detached stance.

Nagel describes the objective perspective as the "view from nowhere", a way of thinking in which only ideas derived independently of the thinker's particular position are considered valuable.

The book was praised by the historian Peter Gay. The philosopher Thomas Metzinger, for his part, praised the book's central concept as "beautiful" but judged it untenable.