Nagel Ernest (1901–85), Czech-born American philosopher, the preeminent American philosopher of science in the period from the mid-1930s to the 1960s. Arriving in New York as a ten-yearold immigrant, he earned his B.S. degree from the College of the City of New York and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1931. He was a member of the Philosophy Department at Columbia from 1930 to 1970. He coauthored the influential An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method with his former teacher, M. R. Cohen. His many publications include two well-known classics: Principles of the Theory of Probability (1939) and Structure of Science (1960).
Nagel was sensitive to developments in logic, foundations of mathematics, and probability theory, and he shared with Russell and with members of the Vienna Circle like Carnap and Phillip Frank a respect for the relevance of scientific inquiry for philosophical reflection. But his writing also reveals the influences of M. R. Cohen and that strand in the thinking of the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey which Nagel himself called ‘contextualist naturalism.’ He was a persuasive critic of Russell’s views of the data of sensation as a source of non-inferential premises for knowledge and of cognate views expressed by some members of the Vienna Circle. Unlike Frege, Russell, Carnap, Popper, and others, he rejected the view that taking account of context in characterizing method threatened to taint philosophical reflection with an unacceptable psychologism. This stance subsequently allowed him to oppose historicist and sociologist approaches to the philosophy of science. Nagel’s contextualism is reflected in his contention that ideas of determinism, probability, explanation, and reduction ‘can be significantly discussed only if they are directed to the theories or formulations of a science and not its subject matter’ (Principles of the Theory of Probability, 1939). This attitude infused his influential discussions of covering law explanation, statistical explanation, functional explanation, and reduction of one theory to another, in both natural and social science. Similarly, his contention that participants in the debate between realism and instrumentalism should clarify the import of their differences for (context-sensitive) scientific methodology served as the core of his argument casting doubt on the significance of the dispute. In addition to his extensive writings on scientific knowledge methodology, Nagel wrote influential essays on measurement, the history of mathematics, and the philosophy of law. See also COVERING LAW MODEL, PHILOSO- PHY OF SCIENCE , REDUCTION , VIENNA CIRCL. I.L. Thomas (b.1937), American professor of philosophy and of law at New York University, known for his important contributions in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Nagel’s work in these areas is unified by a particular vision of perennial philosophical problems, according to which they emerge from a clash between two perspectives from which human beings can view themselves and the world. From an impersonal perspective, which results from detaching ourselves from our particular viewpoints, we strive to achieve an objective view of the world, whereas from a personal perspective, we see the world from our particular point of view. According to Nagel, dominance of the impersonal perspective in trying to understand reality leads to implausible philosophical views because it fails to accommodate facts about the self, minds, agency, and values that are revealed through engaged personal perspectives. In the philosophy of mind, for instance, Nagel criticizes various reductive accounts of mentality resulting from taking an exclusively impersonal standpoint because they inevitably fail to account for the irreducibly subjective character of consciousness. In ethics, consequentialist moral theories (like utilitarianism), which feature strong impartialist demands that stem from taking a detached, impersonal perspective, find resistance from the personal perspective within which individual goals and motives are accorded an importance not found in strongly impartialist moral theories. An examination of such problems in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics is found in his Moral Questions (1979) and The View from Nowhere (1986). In Equality and Partiality (1990) Nagel argues that the impersonal standpoint gives rise to an egalitarian form of impartial regard for all people that often clashes with the goals, concerns, and affections that individuals experience from a personal perspective. Quite generally, then, as Nagel sees it, one important philosophical task is to explore ways in which these two standpoints on both theoretical and practical matters might be integrated.
Nagel has also made important contributions regarding the nature and possibility of reason or rationality in both its theoretical and its practical uses. The Possibility of Altruism (1970) is an exploration of the structure of practical reason in which Nagel defends the rationality of prudence and altruism, arguing that the possibility of such behavior is connected with our capacities to view ourselves respectively persisting through time and recognizing the reality of other persons. The Last Word (1998) is a defense of reason against skeptical views, according to which reason is a merely contingent, locally conditioned feature of particular cultures and hence relative.
See also ETHICS, MORAL RATIONALISM , PHILOSOPHY OF MIND , PRACTICAL REASO. M.C.T.