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Early Years
Ernest Nagel was born on November 16,1901 in Nové Mesto, Bohemia, and immigrated to the U.S at the age of 10. Nagel surprisingly lived an uneventful childhood, growing up in New York City where he received his bachelor degree in social studies from the City College of New York were he then chased his master and doctoral in philosophy at Columbia University. -
Video Logical Positivism
Logical Positivism focuses on the idea that emotions and ethics are meaningless in science, questions that cant be verifiable are invalid and again meaningless!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdSzJdQhCiQ -
Nagel and Cohen
Nagel met and was mentored by Morris R. Cohen, a naturalist who focused on the idea that nature controlled the rules of science and society. Together they published a book, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method, which aimed to shed light at the importance of logic as a core principle in the scientific method. Nagel and Cohen were trying to bring back the ideas of Aristotle's realism in philosophy and allow them a spot in modern scientific reasoning and methods. -
Logical Positivism
Nagel spent a year in Europe where he learned about philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap along with the Vienna Circle and logical positivism movement, and thus Nagel published, Journal of Philosophy. He served as a bridge for Americans to learn about this new growing movement that focused so heavily on relying on verifiability. Ethics seems to cloud judgement in science so this was an attempt to unveil this new perspective on the scientific method. -
The End of Logical Positivism
Nagel’s most famous book, The Structure of Science, broke down explanations in four categories: deductive, probabilistic, teleological, and genetic. Nagel single handedly attempted to tackle a very big area of issues all focusing on the idea that a scientific explanation could be applied in all fields of science! Before Kuhn took the world by storm, Nagel served as a bridge to European philosophy and helped keep logical positivism and naturalism alive. -
Death
Ernest Nagel died on September 22, 1985 in New York City of pneumonia. Awarded many acolated in the world of not just philosophy, but science as well, Nagel continued to be a lecturer and professor until 1973, and never stopped attempting to be an active figure in both the fields of physics and philosophy. -
Bibliography
National Academy of Sciences. 1994. Biographical Memoirs: V.65. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/4548.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Ernest Nagel.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 12 Nov. 2019, www.britannica.com/biography/Ernest-Nagel#ref77307. -
Bibliography PT2
“Nagel, Ernest.” Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Thematic Series: The 1960s, Encyclopedia.com, 28 Apr. 2020, www.encyclopedia.com/people/philosophy-and-religion/philosophy-biographies/ernest-nagel.
