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Born in Nové Mĕsto, Prague (now capital of the Czech Republic; then part of the Austro Hungarian Empire) and immigrated to the United States at the age of ten with his family, receiving US Citizenship in 1919. He attended and graduated from City College of New York in 1923 and earned his doctorate from Columbia University in 1930
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Nagel collaborated and learned from Morris Cohen, who was his teacher at the time at City college of New York, to publish the first and most important textbook on the scientific method. In this book, they explored Empirical Science with emphasis on hypothesis in research. To this day is it considered the bedrock of modern scientific methodology. Cohen, Morris,and Ernest Nagel. An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method. 1934.
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In 1958, he published, with James R. Newman, Gödel's proof, a short book explicating Gödel's incompleteness theorems to those not well trained in mathematical logic. Nagel, Ernest, and James Roy Newman. 1958. Gödel's proof. New York: New York University Press.
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in 1961, Nagel published his masterpiece; The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation. He tried to show the same logic of scientific explanation was valid in all sciences, and that the social and behavioral sciences could be reduced to physical science. Nagel first proposed "Bridge Laws", or equivalences between the terms if different sciences Nagel, Ernest. The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of the Scientific Explanation. Routledge and Kegan, 1974.
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Nagel took the concept that all phenomena result from the essential nature of matter, and developed the theory that the social and behavioral sciences could be translated into the language of the physical sciences. He rejected any efforts at reduction that were not based on scientific experimentation.
