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Ernest Nagel Is Born
Ernest Nagel was born November 16th, 1901 in Nové Město, Bohemia in the modern day Czech Republic. At the age of ten, he immigrated to the United States and would eventually become a naturalized citizen. Nagel would spend virtually his entire life in New York earning his Bachelors at the College of the City of New York and a Masters and Ph.D. at Columbia University, the latter of which he would spend most of his entire academic career as a member of the faculty. -
Can Logic Divorce Ontology?
In a paper published in Columbia University’s Journal of Philosophy titled “Can Logic be Divorced from Ontology?” Nagel argued that logical and ontological traits were reliant on one another. Proposing that ontological traits are the prototypes of logical traits and that ontological traits could not be observed without logical traits. -
The Cognitive Status of Theories
Nagel gave a lecture a U.C. Berkeley discussing scientific instrumentalism and realism. He argues that in many circumstances scientific instrumentalist must accept to varying degrees that at least some theoretical entities must exist and that some theories can be accepted a tentatively true. He says that many do and that the conflict between instrumentalism and realism is largely a linguistic one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXWAXtQK6zE -
The Structure of Science is Published
In 1961 Nagel published one of his most famous books The Structure of Science which consist of his thoughts on many scientific fields and concepts. He discusses laws of nature and how they are structured and formulated and the effect subjunctive conclusions have on how laws are developed.
