NAGEL, ERNEST

NAGEL, ERNEST (1901–1985), U.S. philosopher. Nagel, who was born in Nove Mesto (Moravia), emigrated to America at an early age. He received a B.S. from the City College of New York in 1923 and an M.A. (1925) and a Ph.D. (1930) from Columbia University. He was appointed to Columbia's faculty in 1930. He became John Dewey Professor of Philosophy in 1955 and university professor in 1967. Upon his retirement, he was professor emeritus at Columbia. Though he was best known for his incisive and learned essays in the philosophy of science, Nagel's interests as a philosopher were broad. Many of his writings deal with social and political questions and with questions of religion. In these latter domains, influenced by his interest in the philosophy of science, his work emerges as a type of philosophical naturalism. According to Nagel, the types of explanation of the world that produce human knowledge are essentially those based on the model of explanation in the physical sciences. He argued, however, that such types of explanation must not be interpreted narrowly, as a kind of rigid scientism, but rather broadly; e.g., explanations of mental phenomena are not to be reduced to descriptions of the movement of material particles as in the physical sciences. He thus distinguished between naturalistic explanations and materialistic ones, where "materialism" is taken to mean that philosophical view which denies the existence of mind or mental qualities. In a similar vein, Nagel argued that "determinism" in physical theory is not such as to entail the denial of human freedom with regard to moral and political decisions. His analysis of morality and of human history accordingly allowed for the attribution of responsibility to human agents for their actions. Thus he maintained that naturalism, although committed to giving a correct account of scientific knowledge, includes within its scope a place for imagination, liberal values, and human wisdom. Nagel's main contribution to the philosophy of science is to be found in The Structure of Science (1961). He served as president of the Association of Symbolic Logic (1947–49), and as president of the Philosophy of Science Association (1960–62). Among Nagel's other important writings are An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method, with Morris Raphael Cohen (1934); Principles of the Theory of Probability (1939); Sovereign Reason (1954); Logic without Metaphysics (1956); Gödel's Proof, with James R. Newman (1958); Observation and Theory in Science (1971); and Teleology Revisited and Other Essays in the Philosophy and History of Science (1979). -ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: S. Morgenbesser (ed.), Philosophy, Science, and Method; Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel (1969); E. Madden, Philosophical Problems of Psychology (1962). (Avrum Stroll / Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)