Jennifer Nagel

Jennifer Nagel is a Canadian philosopher at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metacognition. She has also written on 17th century (Western) philosophy, especially John Locke and René Descartes. She has been acting chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto Mississauga since July 2026.

Education and career After a B.A. in philosophy at the University of Toronto, Nagel earned her M.A. (1994) and Ph.D. (2000) in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation, The Role of Necessity in Empirical Knowledge, was written under the supervision of John McDowell.

She joined the University of Toronto as a professor at its Mississauga campus in the year 2000.

Nagel was President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2018–19. She was later president of the Canadian Philosophical Association from 2021 to 2022. Nagel is the program chair for the 2026 APA Central Division meeting.

Philosophical work Much of Nagel's research draws on empirical developments from the cognitive sciences and experimental philosophy in order to address longstanding questions in epistemology and philosophy of mind. For example, Nagel is well known for defending the value of intuitions in philosophical methodology. While the emergence of experimental philosophy in the 21st century has often cast doubt on the reliability of intuitions, Nagel argues that intuitions about particular cases and thought experiments are a legitimate source of knowledge and justification. Nagel also argues, building on suggestions made by Timothy Williamson, that knowledge is a mental state. Whereas knowledge is traditionally thought to be reducible to a form of belief, i.e., a justified and true belief, Nagel argues that knowledge should itself be counted among the fundamental types of mental state, on a par with beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on.

Nagel is the author of Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction, which has been praised as an "admirably clear and engaging" introduction to epistemology. Nagel considers classic questions, including about skepticism, rationalism, and empiricism, as well as more contemporary concerns, such as whether Wikipedia, "where most articles have multiple and anonymous authors", can be a reliable source of knowledge. In 2023, she gave the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford, on recognising knowledge. She argues that human beings have a strong evolved capacity to identify knowledge, but in order to ensure flexibility in our exercise of this capacity, we engage in strategic mapping of others 'epistemic territory': the domains in which they enjoy knowledge. This can involve supposing that others know less than they do, in order to reason about how things would be if they did know less. However useful such strategic thinking about knowledge may be overall, suppositions of ignorance risk confusing our capacities for knowledge recognition, thus explaining the appeal of scepticism.