Ernest Nagel

Ernest Nagel was an American philosopher of science who spent nearly his entire academic career at Columbia University, where he became the university's first John Dewey Professor of Philosophy in 1955. Nagel is best known for his 1961 book The Structure of Science, a systematic treatment of scientific explanation, theory structure and the logic of scientific inquiry that became one of the most influential and widely used texts in the philosophy of science for decades after its publication. In that work Nagel developed an influential account of intertheoretic reduction, proposing that one scientific theory could be reduced to another through bridge laws connecting the terms of the reduced theory to terms in the more fundamental one, work that shaped later debates over whether fields such as biology or psychology could in principle be reduced to physics and chemistry. Nagel is often grouped with Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach and Carl Hempel as a major figure of logical empiricism, applying its emphasis on logical rigor and empirical grounding to questions in the philosophy of mathematics, probability and quantum mechanics. Nagel was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1977 and remained an influential voice for scientific skepticism throughout his career.