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Ernest Nagel Early Life
Ernest Nagel was born on November 16, 1901 in Nove Mesto, Prague. He immigrated to the United States at age 10 and received his US citizenship in 1919. He received his first degree in science in 1923 from City College of New York and then his doctorate from Columbia in 1930. In 1935 he got married to Edith Haggstrom and had 2 kids.
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ernest_Nagel -
Logic Without Ontology
In this piece he defended a naturalistic interpretation of logic. He also showed that the view that logic is ontologically determined or entails ontological commitments arises primarily from a failure to heed certain contextual and operational qualifications of the sense in which logical principles are supposed to possess "necessary truth."
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/krik90018-010/pdf -
Naturalism
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." He also thought that naturalism was the executive and causal primacy of matter in the executive order of nature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66CnFJPAAPI -
The Structure of Science
Nagel wrote many things. But his masterpiece is The Structure of Science: problems in the logic of scientific explanation. The book is 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's account of reduction influenced the philosophy of science. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ernest_Nagel