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Born
Ernest Nagel was born November 16th 1901 in Nove Mesto, Bohemia (modern day Czech Republic). -
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Immigration and Citizenship
Ernest Nagel immigrated to the United States with his parents and one sibling in 1911. In 1919 Ernest became a US citizen. -
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Columbia University
Ernest began teaching philosophy at Columbia University in 1931. Besides a short stint at Rockefeller University in 1966-1967, Ernest taught at Columbia for nearly forty years, retiring from Columbia in 1970. Here are Columbia is where Nagel developed his "naturalist" perspectives, asserting that the laws of science and society were products of nature, not supernatural powers. (Ferrara, 2018) -
Structure of Science
Being one of America's most prominent philosophers of science (Fererra, 2018) Nagel wrote quite extensively, but he is mostly known for his 1961 book Structure of Science, which is considered a defining work in the logic of scientific explanation. Here he discussed four different types of scientific explanation; deductive, probablistic, teleogical and genetic. -
Structure of Science
Nagel defines his four types of explanation as follows:
Deductive - explanation follows logically from premises of the argument.
Probablistic - explanation is probable given the premises.
Teleogical (functional) - explanation defines the goal of what is to be explained.
Genetic - historical explanation that relies on earlier knowledge to explain subject. (Nagel, 1961) -
Relevance after Kuhn
The year after Nagel publishes Structure of Science, Thomas Kuhn publishes his groundbreaking work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which led to a dramatic shift away from Nagel and other logical postitivists. Nagel however continued to stay relevant and in high regard despite the shift due to his continued talks, papers, his open-mindedness and willingness to criticize faulty notions from his era. (Fererra, 2018) -
Died
Ernest Nagel died September 20th 1985 in New York City. -
Atheism
I wasn't able to find many videos discussing Nagel or his philosophy, but Nick Nash has a four part series discussing Ernest Nagel's arguement for atheism. As a naturalist he did not believe in the supernatural. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgouYLtcBgk -
References
Fererra, Adi, Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Thematic Series: The 1960s, June 11 2018 Nagel, Ernest, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, Harcourt, 1961