Ernest Nagel 1901 – 1985

Ernest Nagel was a Czech-American philosopher of science and one of the leading representatives of logical empiricism in the United States. After studies under Morris Cohen at City College and a doctorate at Columbia under John Dewey, he joined the Columbia faculty, where he remained for the rest of his career. His Structure of Science, published in 1961, gave the classic synthetic statement of the empiricist account of scientific explanation, theory reduction, and the logic of historical and social inquiry, while his Goedel's Proof, written with James Newman, made the incompleteness theorems accessible to a wide readership. He defended a thoroughgoing scientific naturalism.

Ernest Nagel was born at Nové Město nad Váhom, in the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in November 1901, and emigrated with his family to New York in 1911. He was educated at the City College of New York under Morris Cohen, took the doctorate at Columbia in 1931 with a dissertation on the logic of measurement, and apart from a brief return to City College spent the rest of his career at Columbia, where he was John Dewey Professor of Philosophy from 1955 and University Professor from 1967.

His books include An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934, with Morris Cohen), Principles of the Theory of Probability (1939), Sovereign Reason (1954), Logic without Metaphysics (1956), Gödel's Proof (1958, with James R. Newman), The Structure of Science (1961), and the late essays of Teleology Revisited (1979). He was a long-serving co-editor of the Journal of Philosophy and the Journal of Symbolic Logic and chief American interpreter of central European logical empiricism.

Nagel defended a thoroughgoing naturalism in which philosophy is continuous with science, gave the canonical account of theory reduction by means of bridge laws, analysed the deductive-nomological pattern of explanation, and argued that teleological language in biology is translatable into causal terms without commitment to purposes in nature. He died in New York in September 1985.