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Place of birth Nové Mesto, Bohemia (now Czechoslovakia), in 1901
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Coming to America
At 10, young Nagel's family moves to the United States, in New York. In 1919, Nagel became a US Citizen. -
City College
Earns a Bachelor of Science degree. Nagel meets one of his most influential mentors and teachers, Morris Cohen. They would later go on to a meaningful collaboration of a successful textbook. -
PhD
Earns his doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University in 1930. While there, Nagel studied the works of several European logical positivists and adopted the verification principle into American pragmatism philosophy that something is true because it works. -
Career - What you know + Context
Joins the faculty at Columbia University in the Philosophy Department and spent all but one year of his career there. Further taking his American Pragmatic and logical positivism philosophies he develops, "contextualistic analysis" (that different contexts set different epistemic standards, and contextualists invariably maintain that the standards do in fact vary from context to context.) - https://iep.utm.edu/contextu/ -
An Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method
Along with a former professor, Morris Cohen, Nagel collaborated on and published a widely respected and successful textbook on the Scientific Method. -
The Structure of Science: Problems in the logic of scientific explanation
Published in 1961, Nagel sought to construct a bridge between the natural and social sciences vis-à-vis reductionism (a system that breaks down complex phenomena into its essential parts to help explain the subject, e.g., in biology, how cells work are broken down into atoms then molecule...) and the holism approach (emphasizes the whole system, e.g., how an entity relates to its environment). -
Date of Death
Nagel dies from complications of pneumonia at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.