Ernest Nagel

  • Ernest Nagel Life and Death

    Ernest Nagel Life and Death
    Ernest Nagel was born on November 16, 1901, and died on September 20, 1985. He was born in Nové Mesto, Bohemia which is now part of Czechoslovakia. He came to the United States and earned his American citizenship in 1919. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University in 1931. From there, he began teaching at Columbia University from 1931 to 1970. In “1935, he married Edith Alexandria Haggstrom, and they had two sons” (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine).
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    Ernest Nagel's Legacy

    Ernest Nagel is recognized for the role he played in promoting the intellectual life of Columbia University and New York City. He offered an analysis of the philosophy of the scientific method. Through his forty years at Columbia University, Ernest Nagel essentially became the philosophical voice for reflections on scientific beliefs. He questioned theories such as geometry which he was highly interested in.
  • Ernest Nagel's Work

    Nagel, Ernest. The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation. Harcourt, Brace &World, 1961.
  • Ernest Nagel's Contribution to Science

    Ernest Nagel’s contribution to science is how he questioned the nature of science in more than one regard. He questioned geometry, physics, measurement, and probability. He was devoted to the analysis of theories in these departments and examined and questioned how the foundations of each department were created. Ernest Nagel was elected to the National Academy of Sciences even though he was a philosopher.
  • Short YouTube Video

    Skip to four minutes and four seconds to hear from a student of Ernest Nagel.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U3C-VHiZME
  • Works' Cited

    National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 1994. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 65. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/4548.”