Ernest nagel

Ernest Nagel Born: November 16, 1901 Died: September 20, 1985

By Joseph Conley

  • Ernest Nagel

    Ernest Nagel
    Ernest Nagel was born Nov. 16, 1901, Nové Město, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary. Nagel Came to the United States in 1911 and received American citizenship in 1919. He then taught philosophy at Columbia University from 1931 to 1970. Formerly an exponent of logical realism, Nagel later abandoned a realistic ontology for an empirical and theoretical philosophy of science

  • Ernest's Works

    Ernest's Works
    Many of Nagel’s writings were articles or book reviews; two of his books, Sovereign Reason (1954) and Logic without Metaphysics (1957) are collections of previously published articles. His masterpiece was The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (1961). His other books were written in collaboration with others: An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (with M. R. Cohen, 1934), and Observation and Theory in Science (1971).

  • Naturalism

    Naturalism
    He rejected any efforts at reduction that were not based on scientific experimentation.In his presidential address of 1954 to the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, Nagel defined naturalism as "a generalized account of the cosmic scheme and of man's place in it, as well as a logic of inquiry." Naturalism, he said, was "the executive and causal primacy of matter in the executive order of nature".

  • The Structure of Science

    The Structure of Science
    The Structure of Science (1961), an examination of the logical structure of scientific concepts and the claims of knowledge in various sciences, was one of the earliest and most important works in the field of the philosophy of science. Nagel tried to show that the same logic of scientific explanation was valid in all sciences, and that the social and behavioral sciences could be reduced to physical science.

  • Final Notes

    Final Notes
    What is equally important is to emphasize the unity of his vision of the nature of scientific inquiry and the critical role that philosophy of science can have in rooting out mistaken conceptions and ill-thought-out claims of significance.Because of the emphasis he placed on criticism, it is not possible in any simple way to summarize the unity of Ernest Nagel's intellectual vision.