12 Facts About Ernest Nagel

Ernest Nagel was an American philosopher of science.

Ernest Nagel emigrated to the United States at the age of 10 and became a US citizen in 1919.

Ernest Nagel received a BSc from the City College of New York in 1923, and earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1931, with a dissertation on the concept of measurement.

Except for one year at Rockefeller University, Ernest Nagel spent his entire academic career at Columbia.

Ernest Nagel became the first John Dewey Professor of Philosophy there in 1955.

Ernest Nagel expounded the different kinds of explanation in different fields, and was sceptical about attempts to unify the nature of scientific laws or explanations.

Ernest Nagel was the first to propose that by positing analytic equivalencies between the terms of different sciences, one could eliminate all ontological commitments except those required by the most basic science.

Ernest Nagel upheld the view that social sciences are scientific, and should adopt the same standards as natural sciences.

Ernest Nagel wrote An Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method with Morris Raphael Cohen, his CCNY teacher in 1934.

Ernest Nagel edited the Journal of Philosophy and the Journal of Symbolic Logic.

Ernest Nagel was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ernest Nagel had two sons, Alexander Nagel and Sidney Nagel.