Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of the life (Sect. 1.1) and philosophy (Sect. 1.2) of Ernest Nagel, as well as a summary of the chapters in this volume (Sect. 1.3). Regarding Nagel's philosophy, we focus on his role and activities to stabilize analytic philosophy (of science) and make it a profession, his views about the role and nature of history and sociology of science, naturalism, and socially engaged philosophy, and finally his understanding of the relation between science, society, and philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
Dudley Meek to Ernest Nagel and Morris R. Cohen, January 18, 1944; quoted from Nagel (ms).
- 2.
The quotations are taken from the interview with Nagel published in this volume.
- 3.
Recently, Matthew Brown (2012) has tried to rehabilitate John Dewey’s philosophy of science in more accessible terms.
- 4.
This does not mean, however, that Nagel was unfamiliar with the main trends in logical empiricism. He read some of Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s writings as early as the late 1920s, and published a paper in Erkenntnis about measurement already in 1931. On these early encounters, see Sander Verhaegh’s paper in this volume.
- 5.
Ernest Nagel to Rudolf Carnap, January 5, 1935.
- 6.
Ernest Nagel to Rudolf Carnap, March 6, 1935. Karl Menger (1994) has confirmed this impression that he was somewhat of a skeptical outsider concerning the Wittgensteinian choir.
- 7.
Some of these issues are reconstructed in Yvonne Nagel’s and Fons Dewulf’s chapters. For further details, see Dewulf (2018).
- 8.
- 9.
While they are not widely discussed among historians of philosophy of science, Nagel did edit other influential volumes, such as a collection of readings on Meaning and Knowledge (Nagel 1965) that introduced many classical analytic thinkers to the community of epistemologists.
- 10.
- 11.
In the Preface to Structure, Nagel noted that further topics in philosophy (such as the evaluation of knowledge claims, concept formation, etc.) are reserved for a volume that is under “active preparation” (1961, p. ix). Although he also confirmed his intentions to Hempel a few years later (“I want to work on the sequel to the Structure of Science”), he had other obligations, and seemingly gave up on the publication of any systematic work that would function as volume two (Nagel to Hempel, June 18, 1964, quoted from Tuboly (ms.)).
- 12.
A few years before, Nagel formulated this broad approach as follows: “the task of logic is to make explicit the structures of methods and assumptions employed in the search for reliable knowledge in the all fields of inquiry” (1956b, p. ix).
- 13.
- 14.
It would be highly constructive to consider Nagel’s relation to Carnap and Frank in detail, especially because Nagel thanked both Carnap and Frank for their invaluable help in his The Structure of Science (1961, p. x) and in the introduction to Logic Without Metaphysics (1956b, p. xii). Some of these issues are taken up by Thomas Mormann in this volume.
- 15.
It should also be borne in mind that three decades earlier, Nagel had distinguished between at least four different meanings of “method of science”: (a) methods in the sense of different instruments and specialized techniques; (b) methods as various disciplinary approaches and outlooks; (c) methods extracted from the behavior and anthropology of scientists; and (4) methods as ways of evaluating concerning evidence and principles. Nagel (1950b, p. 20) calls the fourth type the “logic of inquiry” (original emphasis) and states that the first three presuppose or come down to different or numerous scientific methods (in fact, the third approach has shown that “there is apparently no such thing as scientific method,” ibid.).
- 16.
This passage is taken from Nagel’s commentary on A.C. Crombie’s and Joseph T. Clark’s papers about history and philosophy of science, published in Marshall Clagett’s Critical Problems in the History of Science. Nagel notes that he is not a historian of science with first-hand knowledge, for example, of medieval science, but as some of the major points of the discussion turned on “philosophical interpretations,” he is “perhaps not completely miscast as a discussant” (Nagel 1959/1969, p. 153).
- 17.
On Nagel’s role in the formation of analytic philosophy, see Schliesser (2013).
- 18.
In an interview, Joseph Margolis told an interesting story about Nagel and Marxism: At a discussion, John Sommerville—then a well-known Marxist philosopher at Columbia—talked about Marxism. Sommerville “was rather well-known but not a very strong figure, and his commentator was Ernest Nagel. Nagel said, I remember it to this day, after Summerville gave his account: well, since Professor Summerville hasn’t told you what Marxism is, I’ll begin by defining it, which he then did very well” (Margolis 2014, p. 306). This story once more confirms Nagel’s wide and deep knowledge of history of philosophy.
- 19.
Nagel is concerned here with the continuity or rebirth of European philosophies (such as idealism, voluntarism, and positivism) in America. As he says, “America shares with western Europe a comparable literary and religious heritage, a similar social and economic structure, and above all an identical science” (1947/1954, p. 51).
- 20.
In 1950, when talking about the methods of science, Nagel noted that scientists should also consult the history and sociology of science to become acquainted with all the ways in which things could go astray. Nagel’s list contains factors other than cognitive ones—the premature delimitation of variables, the influence of intellectual fashions and tacitly accepted philosophies, the pressure to justify results to a larger community, and the reluctance to abandon favored but doubtful ideas (1950b, p. 22). This may indicate that for Nagel, the sociology and history of science are mainly the sociology and history of errors, and not those of truth (as others would have it). The same could also be said of history of science; at one point, Nagel claims (in the context of education) that history of science is “the history of magnificent victories as well as of tragic defeats for human intelligence in its endless war against native ignorance, childish superstitions, and baseless fears” (1959, p. 57).
- 21.
Note that only a decade later, Bernard Barber, who was a close colleague of Robert Merton (one of the leaders of this project), and who also had links to Frank, published his famous paper (quoted in Structure by Kuhn as well) on “Resistance by Scientists to Scientific Discovery” (Barber 1961).
- 22.
- 23.
- 24.
One might even wonder how Neurath, given his non-reductive, pluralist naturalism, could disagree to such an extent with Nagel. Moreover, Neurath also repeatedly called attention to the dangers of formalism and systematization throughout his writings in the 1930s and 40s.
- 25.
Public inspection, intersubjectivity and accountability are such terms and norms, which also played a significant role within the so-called left-wing of the Vienna Circle; see Uebel (2020).
- 26.
In these contexts, Nagel often uses the term “responsibility.” See, for example, his introduction to Logic Without Metaphysics where he talks about the “responsible critiques of cognitive claims” (1956b, p. ix).
- 27.
This paper was an editorial-like introduction to an issue of Scientific American about automatization in industry and the workplace. Nagel argues further that automatization, mechanization, the extreme use of quantitative issues and algorithms would not deprive humanity of all qualitative considerations and values immanent to our life and thinking. He even says, “there is no reason why liberation from the unimaginative drudgery which has been the lot of so many men throughout the ages should curtail opportunities for creative thought and for satisfaction in work well done” (1952, p. 47).
- 28.
Regarding many of these journals and associations and their role in professionalizing the philosophy of science, see Dewulf (2021).
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Yvonne, Alexander, and Sidney Nagel for their support of the project and for their permission to use the archive materials of Ernest Nagel. Carnap's letters are quoted from the Rudolf Carnap Papers, Archives of Scientific Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved. Papers of the volume were first presented at the “Ernest Nagel and the Making of Philosophy of Science” conference organized at the Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (October 4, 2019). Adam Tamas Tuboly was supported by the MTA Lendulet Morals and Science Research Group and by the MTA Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship during the editorial work. We thank Christoph Gottstein for his help with the linguistic corrections, and all our authors for their work and time devoted to this project. We are also indebted to the numerous referees who read and commented the individual chapters, and to the two anonymous referees of the press who read through the whole volume and provided helpful comments.
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Neuber, M., Tuboly, A.T. (2022). Introduction: Ernest Nagel and the Making of Philosophy of Science a Profession. In: Neuber, M., Tuboly, A.T. (eds) Ernest Nagel: Philosophy of Science and the Fight for Clarity. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 53. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81010-8_1
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