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Early Life and Schooling
Ernest Nagel was born Nov. 16, 1901, Nové Město, Prague. At the age of 10, he migrated to the United States with his family, and became a U.S. citizen in 1919. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the City College of New York in 1923, and earned his doctorate from Columbia University in 1930. He joined the faculty of philosophy at Columbia in 1931. Except for one year (1966-1967) at Rockefeller University, he spent his entire academic career at Columbia. -
"An Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method"
Nagel collaborated with Morris Cohen, his teacher at City College of New York on An Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method, which was published in 1934 and became one of the first and most successful textbooks of scientific method. They explored the study of empirical science through experimentation, emphasizing the role of hypotheses in conducting research. -
Nagel's Naturalism
Early on, Nagel advocated logical realism, that the principles of logic represent the universal and eternal traits of nature. After studying the teachings of Wittgenstein and the European logical positivists, Nagel adapted them to the naturalism of the American pragmatists. He developed what he called “contextualistic analysis,” a method for interpreting "the meanings of theoretical constructions in terms of their manifest functions in identifiable contexts." -
More on Nagel's Naturalism
In his 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" and "the manifest plurality and variety of things, of their qualities and their functions, an irreducible feature of the universe." -
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.