Ernest Nagel
(1901-1985)
Ernest Nagel was a well-known philosopher of science, whose 1961 book
The Structure of Science is considered a foundational work in the logic of scientific explanation. He is considered one of the major figures of the logical positivist movement, along with
Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel. Nagel brought analytic language philosophy to the philosophy of science.
With his CCNY professor Morris Raphael Cohen, Nagel wrote
An Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method in 1934. In 1958 With James R. Newman he wrote
Gödel's proof about Gödel's incompleteness theorems. He was an editor of the
Journal of Philosophy and the
Journal of Symbolic Logic.
The logical positivist tradition of a structure of science put the
unity of science at the core of philosophy of science, including Carl Hempel’s deductive-nomological model of explanation and Ernest Nagel’s model of
reduction.
The reductionist's model of explanation claims that causal laws of nature in the base level must causally determine the laws of a higher level. This results in a highly simplistic, materialistic, and
deterministic view, for example that the contents of the world today were knowable by a
Laplacian demon (or
God) at the origin of the world.
Our
cosmic reaction process, by contrast, shows that new information has been entering the universe since its origin, at many levels, from the formation of elementary partials like protons and neutrons, to atoms and molecules, to planets, stars, and galaxies, and beyond to
life,
mind, and
consciousness.
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