Another notable characteristic of Nagel's primer is its emphasis on questions rather than answers, a feature that is defined by an unwavering interest in the special character and the distinctive difficulty of philosophical problems. Nagel reckons that we learn far more from thinking about how and why philosophical questions and dilemmas elude complete and conclusive treatment than from relentlessly trying to come up with definitive answers to them. After all, what would we expect final answers to look like, to such questions as 'How do you know the world really exists?', 'Do we have free will?', 'Is inequality unjust?', 'What is the meaning of life?' All of Nagel's writings prompt us to put our trust in problems over solutions, not defeatedly or insouciantly, but on the grounds that identifying what makes them recalcitrant points us to the truth of the matter. As he says himself:

It may be that philosophical problems have no solutions. I suspect this is true of the deepest and oldest of them. They show us the limits of our understanding. In that case such insight as we can achieve depends on maintaining a strong grasp of the problem instead of abandoning it, and coming to understand the failure of each new attempt at a solution, and of earlier attempts. (That is why we study the works of philosophers like Plato and Berkeley, whose views are accepted by no one.) Unsolvable problems are not for that reason unreal. (Mortal Questions)

Many professional philosophers have regarded this feature of Nagel's outlook as verging on heretical since it appears to favour intuition over argument and, as a result, inhibit the serious business of disinterested analysis and philosophical advancement. They argue that the questions of philosophy are significantly more corrigible than he is prepared to admit. Nonetheless, what Nagel compels us to confront is the very real possibility that the most fundamental problems of philosophy are insoluble but, crucially, no less meaningful and important for that. Taking on board Nagel's view of philosophy can be an unnerving experience since it asks us to doubt some of our most strongly held pre-theoretical as well as theoretical assumptions, not least the common presupposition that every authentic problem must have a definitive solution or, put negatively, that only spurious problems lack genuine solutions.

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