New APPS

The review, in BioScience, is available here. I highly recommend it for its cool, judicious treatment, as well as for the glimpse into Evan's own approach, near the end of the review:

Nagel neglects another important body of work closely connected to ­theoretical and experimental models of the origins of life. This work concerns complex or self-organizing systems and comprises theoretical biology, dynamical systems theory, and philosophy. A number of theorists have argued that certain types of self-organizing systems exhibit a kind of natural teleology in the sense of a directedness arising from being self-producing and self-maintaining (Juarrero 1999, Thompson E 2007, Deacon 2012). This kind of directedness does not involve teleological laws beyond or outside of the laws of physics, unlike the natural teleology that Nagel proposes but does not develop fully. Moreover, such self-producing and self-maintaining systems arguably exhibit protomental characteristics and thereby provide a bridge from the physical order to the orders of life and the mind. Nagel's book falls short in not taking this work into account.

Finally, Nagel never stops to consider that his concepts of consciousness and the physical body may be part of the problem. For Nagel, consciousness is private, first-person experience, and the physical body is a complex mechanism. A different approach argues that consciousness, most fundamentally, is the feeling of being alive—a feeling that is necessarily bodily and that is also necessary for certain kinds of life-regulation processes of the body (Thompson E 2007). According to this view, there is no way to pry apart consciousness, life, and the physical body in the way that Nagel presupposes.

Treatments of these two books, from other angles, appeared at New APPS by Eric and Mohan.

Eric's pieces on Nagel are here and here and here. Mohan's are here and here. 

And something by Mohan on Fodor/Piatelli-Palmarini is here.