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Birth
ERNEST NAGEL was born November 16, 1901, in Nové Mesto, Bohemia (now part of Czechoslovakia) and came to the United States when he was ten years old. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1919, and received his higher education entirely in the United States. -
Education
In 1923 he received a Bachelor of Science from the College of the City of New York, in 1925 a Master's Degree in philosophy from Columbia University, and in 1931, a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia. He spent most of his academic career at Columbia. -
Career 1931-1970
He was on the faculty there from 1931 to 1970, with the exception of the academic year 1966-67 when he accepted a position at Rockefeller University. From 1967 to 1970 he held the position of university professor at Columbia, and he continued to be active in the intellectual affairs of the university after his retirement, including teaching seminars and courses. Ernest Nagel died in New York City on September 20, 1985. -
Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method.
Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method. This publication is considered to be one of the bedrocks of scientific philosophy, highlighting logical principles within the scientific method across multiple academic disciplines. -
FOUNDATIONS OF GEOMETRY
The central role that geometry played in the development of the abstract form of modern mathematics has often not been appreciated sufficiently in discussions of the foundations of mathematics by mathematicians and philosophers. Nagel's long essay, published in 1939, was one of the first historical analyses to recognize the great importance of the break that was made by the introduction of projective geometry for later views on the foundations of mathematics. -
Explanation and Laws
The general topic of causality, and also the nature of scientific explanations and laws, are topics to which Nagel returned again and again in his career. His most extensive discussion is to be found in his magisterial book, The Structure of Science, which has as its subtitle Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation. Here he devoted a chapter to patterns of scientific explanation with an analysis of four kinds of explanation offered in science. -
Scientific Explanation in Biology
Over a period of many years, Nagel published a number of articles on the character of scientific explanations in biology. He included in The Structure of Science a chapter on mechanistic explanation and organismic biology, and in the John Dewey lectures, given at Columbia University in 1977, he gave perhaps his most thorough analysis of the concept of teleology in biology. Nagel's Dewey lectures provided a reformulation and reexamination of his earlier writings on teleological explanation. -
Deth
Ernest Nagel died on September 9th of 1985. He was 83 years old. He died of pneumonia at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.
