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Early Life and career
Ernest Nagel was born in what is now modern day Czechoslovakia and emigrated to New York in 1911. He remained there and began to establish himself as an educator, eventually earning a Doctorate in Philosophy. In his early days, Nagel advocated "logical realism, holding that the principles of logic represent the universal and eternal traits of nature"(New). This would come to change in later years with the study of European logical positivism. -
"An Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method"
created In coop with his mentor Morris Cohen, this writing became one of the first and most successful textbooks of scientific method. -
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Career into Naturalism
Nagel began teaching as a professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and became part of a core group of naturalists- "philosophers who believed that only nature, without the assistance of supernatural powers, was responsible for the laws of science and society(Encyclopedia). Nagel undertook logical positivism and wrote powerful scientific literature incorporating as well as advocating its unique "marriage of linguistics and empiricism"(The). -
"Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe"
This Essay part of a greater journal of writings introduced the work of the European philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap to Americans -
"Logic without Ontology”
This academic paper employed the use of logical positivism to explore the expression of logic and mathematics in purely linguistic terms. -
Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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Further Contributions and Retirement
Among his 40 years served in Columbia Uni as an academic leader he emphasized what philosophy offered "in terms of analysis of the scientific method, as it is practiced in many different sciences, and in the relation between science and substantive problems of philosophy such as causality and determinism"(National). Nagel was a firm skeptic and fond of criticism which he hoped to instill in others. He retired in 1970 but continued intellectual seminars and writings until his death in 1985. -
"The Structure of Science"
One of Nagel's best literary works and considered as one of the best works on the philosophy of science. -
Became Columbia's University Professor
A prestigious role at Colombia University that Nagel held for 3 years -
Death
Ernest Nagel died of Pneumonia in NYC