Ernest Nagel (November 16, 1901 — September 22, 1985) was among the most important philosophers of science of his time.
Nagel was born in Prague (now capital of the Czech Republic; then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and immigrated to the United States at the age of 10 with his family. He received a BSc from the City College of New York in 1923, and earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1930. Except for one year (1966-1967) at Rockefeller University, he spent his entire academic career at Columbia, becoming a University Professor in 1967.
His 1961 masterpiece, The Structure of Science, practically inaugurated the field of analytic philosophy of science. He was the first to propose that by positing analytic equivalencies (or "bridge laws") between the terms of different sciences, one could eliminate all ontological commitments except those required by the most basic science. Along with Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel, he is one of the major figures of the logical positivist movement.
Nagel wrote An Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method with Morris Cohen, his CCNY teacher. In 1958, he published with James R. Newman Gödel's proof, a short book explicating Gödel's incompleteness theorems to those not well trained in mathematical logic. He edited the Journal of Philosophy (1939-1956) and the Journal of Symbolic Logic (1940-1946).
Books
- Principles of the Theory of Probability
- The Logic of Measurement
- An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (with M. R. Cohen, 1934),
- Sovereign Reason (1954),
- Logic without Metaphysics (1957),
- The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (1961),
- Observation and Theory in Science (with others, 1971).
- Gödel’s Proof
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