Ernest Nagel Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to Ernest Nagel, organized by topic.
Browse Ernest Nagel by topic
Ernest Nagel on Freedom
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“When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so. There is of course a profound logic in this paradox : genuine knowledge is egalitarian in that it allows no privileged source, testers, messengers of Truth . It tolerates no privileged and circumscribed data. The autonomy of knowledge is a leveller.”
Plough, Sword, and Book : The Structure of Human History (1988), Ch. 5 : Codification, p. 123
Ernest Nagel on Justice
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“Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own.”
The Coming of Nationalism and Its Interpretation: The Myths of Nation and Class in Mapping the Nation
Ernest Nagel on Knowledge
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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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“The way forward does not lie in amateur and comically timeless linguistic sociology which takes ‘forms of life ’ for granted (and this is what philosophy has been recently), but in the systematic study of forms of life which does not take them for granted at all. It hardly matters whether such an inquiry is called philosophy or sociology.”
The crisis in the humanities and in the mainstream of philosophy (1964), reprinted in The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974) -
“(J. L. Austin's) admirers claim that his supreme preoccupation was truth. His work, with its sad conjunction of extraordinary cunning in presentation with very thin content, leaves rather the impression of a man who had little sense of real problems but who liked winning arguments and dominating people in the course of them, and who was well equipped to gratify his taste. He was the supreme dialec”
Poker Player (1969), reprinted in The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974) -
“The Coming of Nationalism and Its Interpretation: The Myths of Nation and Class in Mapping the Nation”
Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own. -
“Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel , and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein ; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right.”
Spectacles & Predicaments (1979) -
“Spectacles & Predicaments (1979)”
Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel , and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein ; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right. -
“Concepts and Community , in Relativism and the Social Sciences (1985)”
Wittgenstein 's appeal lies in the fact that he provides a strange kind of vindication of romanticism, of conceptual Gemeinschaft , of custom-based concepts rather than statute-seeking Reform, and that he does so through a very general theory of meaning, rather than from the premisses habitually used for this purpose. Because there is no unique formal notation valid for all speech, each and every
Ernest Nagel on Nature
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Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Naturalism, properly understood, is the philosophy of the scientific intelligence.”