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.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic, Positivism
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Science is the systematic refinement of common knowledge.”
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Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“To explain is to deduce a phenomenon from general laws and initial conditions.”
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Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Reduction unites the sciences without dissolving their distinctions.”
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Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Probabilistic reasoning is essential to all empirical inquiry.”
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Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Naturalism, properly understood, is the philosophy of the scientific intelligence.”