It is plausible to think, with Nagel, that part of what it is to be a person is to be able to take up an external standpoint.
But it is precisely the viability of such an external standpoint that Quine denies in his embrace of the metaphor of Neurath's boat.
Instead, he maps common life from within, correcting it where necessary with its own tools rather than trying either to justify or to criticize it from an external standpoint.
When one takes up this most external standpoint and views one's finite and even downright puny impact on the world, little of one's life appears to matter.
This survey closes by discussing the most well-known rationale for nihilism, namely, Thomas Nagel's (1986) invocation of the external standpoint that purportedly reveals our lives to be unimportant (see also Hanfling 1987, 22 24; Benatar 2006, 60 92; cf. Dworkin 2000, ch. 6).
Very few accept the authority of the (most) external standpoint (Ellin 1995, 316 17; Blackburn 2001, 79 80; Schmidtz 2001) or the implications that Nagel believes it has for the meaning of our lives (Quinn 2000, 65 66; Singer 1993, 333 34; Wolf 1997b, 19 21).
If such evaluations are legitimate, then, contrary to what Strawson suggested, it seems that an existing practice can be questioned from a standpoint external to it.
In contrast, the most external perspective, an encompassing standpoint utterly independent of one's particularity, would be, to use Henry Sidgwick's phrase, the "point of view of the universe," that is, the standpoint that considers the interests of all sentient beings at all times and in all places.
While the study design is desirable from the standpoint of external validity, it cannot apportion response as related to nonspecific versus direct medication effect.
An account of the conditions under which an individual agent is bullied by her motives is, at the same time, an account of what makes a motive external to the agent's own standpoint).
