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Lifespan
Ernest Nagel was born on November 16, 1901 In Slovakia, then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and died on September 20, 1985 in New York. -
Foundation in Education
Nagel earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1931, with a dissertation on the concept of measurement. Except for one year (1966-1967) at Rockefeller University, he spent his entire academic career at Columbia, becoming a University Professor in 1967 until his retirement in 1970, after which he continued to teach. -
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Further Publications
Nagel wrote An Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method with Morris Raphael Cohen, his CCNY teacher in 1934. In 1958, he published with James R. Newman Gödel's proof, a short book explaining Godel's incompleteness theorems to those not well trained in mathematical logic. He edited the Journal of Philosophy (1939–1956) and the Journal of Symbolic Logic (1940-1946). -
The Cognitive Status of Theories
Nagel's Howison lecture at UC Berkeley in 1960 is linked below, where he discusses the cognitive status of scientific theories and related issues regarding scientific realism and instrumentalism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXWAXtQK6zE -
The Structure of Science
Nagel's book The Structure of Science practically inaugurated the field of analytic philosophy of science. He expounded the different kinds of explanation in different fields, and was skeptical about attempts to unify the nature of scientific laws or explanations. He was the first to propose that by positing analytic equivalencies (or "bridge laws") between the terms of different sciences, one could eliminate all ontological commitments except those required by the most basic science. -
John Dewey Lectures
In the John Dewey lectures, given at Columbia University in 1977, Nagel gave perhaps his most thorough analysis of the concept of teleology in biology. Nagel's Dewey lectures provided a reformulation and reexamination of his earlier writings on ideological explanation.
