Background
Ernest Nagel was born in Czechoslovakia on November 16, 1901. His family emigrated to the United States when Ernest was 10 years old. He became an American citizen in 1919.
(Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific...)
Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation Hardcover: 634 pages Publisher: Routledge & Kegan Paul PLC (December 1961) Language: English ISBN-10: 0710018827
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(The Structure of Science Hardcover Jan 01, 1961 Nagel, Er...)
The Structure of Science Hardcover Jan 01, 1961 Nagel, Ernest
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(5½" x 8" x ½" - 118 pages - 2nd impression.)
5½" x 8" x ½" - 118 pages - 2nd impression.
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(From the Introduction. In 1931 there appeared in a Germa...)
From the Introduction. In 1931 there appeared in a German scientific periodical a relatively short paper with the forbidding title "Uber formal unentscheidbare Satze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme" ("On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems"). Its author was Kurt Gödel, then a young mathematician of 25 at the University of Vienna and since 1938 a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The paper is a milestone in the history of logic and mathematics. When Harvard University awarded Gödel an honorary degree in 1952, the citation described the work as one of the most important advances in logic in modern times. At the time of its appearance, however, neither the title of Gödel's paper nor its content was intelligible to most mathematicians. The Principia Mathematica mentioned in the title is the monumental three-volume treatise by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell on mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics; and familiarity with that work is not a prerequisite to successful research in most branches of mathematics. Moreover, Gödel's paper deals with a set of questions that has never attracted more than a comparatively small group of students. The reasoning of the proof was so novel at the time of its publication that only those intimately conversant with the technical literature of a highly specialized field could follow the argument with ready comprehension. Nevertheless, the conclusions Gödel established are now widely recognized as being revolutionary in their broad philosophical import. It is the aim of the present essay to make the substance of Gödel's findings and the general character of his proof accessible to the non-specialist. Gödel's famous paper attacked a central problem in the foundations of mathematics. It will be helpful to give a brief preliminary account of the context in which the problem occurs. Everyone who has been exposed to elementary geometry will doubtless recall that it is taught as a deductive discipline. It is not presented as an experimental science whose theorems are to be accepted because they are in agreement with observation. This notion, that a proposition may be established as the conclusion of an explicit logical proof, goes back to the ancient Greeks, who discovered what is known as the "axiomatic method" and used it to develop geometry in a systematic fashion. The axiomatic method consists in accepting without proof certain propositions as axioms or postulates (e.g., the axiom that through two points just one straight line can be drawn), and then deriving from the axioms all other propositions of the system as theorems. The axioms constitute the ''foundations" of the system; the theorems are the "superstructure," and are obtained from the axioms with the exclusive help of principles of logic.
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( Ernest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy is the first ext...)
Ernest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy is the first extensive examination of the relationship of Hemingway to his hometown, Oak Park, Illinois, and the influence its people, places, and underlying values had on his early work. In this volume, 11 leading Hemingway scholars explore various aspects of these issues, from the migration of the Hemingway family from Connecticut to Illinois in the 1850s, to Hemingway's high-school stories and the dramatic breakthrough of In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises. With these books, Hemingway suddenly became one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. The essays in this collection explore the social and family background that provided the material and sensibility for these literary masterpieces. In these essays, James Nagel provides the first account ever published of the move of the Hemingway family from Connecticut to Illinois. Writing his account after the discovery of a lost diary by one of Hemingway's ancestors, Nagel explores dates and places, the motivation for the move to the Midwest, and the tragedies that awaited the family there, including the death of two young men in the Civil War. Michael Reynolds, the premiere biographer of Ernest Hemingway, describes the culture of the village of Oak Park at the turn of the century, and Larry E. Grimes presents an important new assessment of the religious training the Hemingway children received. David Marut discusses the short stories Hemingway published while still a highschool student, and Carlos Azevedo, Mary Anne O'Neal, Abby H. P. Werlock, and George Monteiro examine the early stories about Nick Adams. In an insightful afterword, Morris Buske, the Historian of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, reflects on the differing values of Ernest Hemingway's parents, the artistic, cultured Hall family as opposed to the scientific, more practical Hemingways, charting the influence the two traditions had on the young Ernest.
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( "Ernest Nagel's work, The Structure of Science, has ear...)
"Ernest Nagel's work, The Structure of Science, has earned for itself the status of an outstanding standard work in its field. It offers an exceptionally thorough and comprehensive methodological and philosophical exploration encountered in those diverse fields. Nagel's discussion is distinguished by the lucidity of its style, the incisiveness of its reasoning, and the solidity of its grounding in all the major branches of scientific inquiry. The Structure of Science has become a highly influential work that is widely invoked in the methodological and philosophical literature. Recent controversies between analytics and historic-sociological approaches to the philosophy of science have not diminished its significance; in fact, it seems to me that the pragmatist component in Nagel's thinking may be helpful for efforts to develop a rapprochement between the contending schools." --Carl G. Hempel
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( Written for independent study and suitable for an intro...)
Written for independent study and suitable for an introductory course in logic, this classic text combines a sound presentation of logic with effective pedagogy and illustrates the role of logic in many areas of humanistic and scientific thought. Cohen and Nagel's elegant integration of the history of philosophy, natural science, and mathematics helps earn this work its distinguished reputation.
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Ernest Nagel was born in Czechoslovakia on November 16, 1901. His family emigrated to the United States when Ernest was 10 years old. He became an American citizen in 1919.
He received a BSc from the City College of New York in 1923, and earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1931, with a dissertation on the concept of measurement.
Except for a year at City College at the beginning of his teaching career and a year (1966 - 1967) at Rockefeller University, he was a professor of philosophy at Columbia University. In 1967, he became a University Professor at Columbia, the most distinguished academic rank. In addition, he served as an editor of the Journal of Philosophy (1939 - 1956) and of the Journal of Symbolic Logic (1940 - 1946). Pioneer in Scientific Logic At City College, Nagel studied under Morris Cohen, who emphasized the role of reason in science. Nagel's association with Cohen led to the publication of An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934), one of the first and most successful textbooks in the field. Cohen and Nagel claimed to have found "a place for the realistic formalism of Aristotle, the scientific pragmatism of [Charles S. ] Peirce, the pedagogical soundness of [John] Dewey, and the mathematical rigor of [Bertrand] Russell. " They interpreted empirical science experimentally, stressing the role of hypotheses in conducting research. Trained as a logician, Nagel wrote his earliest books on logic. In the 19306, Nagel wrote two textbooks, Principles of the Theory of Probability and The Logic of Measurement. Introduced Wittgenstein to Americans After a year of study in Europe, Nagel published a historic report, "Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe, " in the Journal of Philosophy (1936). This essay introduced Americans to the philosophical work of the European philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap. Nagel sought to adapt the teachings of the logical positivists to the more comprehensive framework of American pragmatic naturalism. The influence of logical positivism on his thought resulted in his concepts of logic and mathematics in linguistic terms. This conclusion was developed in his 1944 paper "Logic without Ontology. " Most of Nagel's writings took the form of journal articles and book reviews. Two of his books Sovereign Reason (1954) and Logic without Metaphysics (1957) consist wholly of previously published articles. These showed him to be one of the most analytic and critical thinkers in American philosophy. They also expressed and illustrated Nagel's method of contextualistic analysis, by which he interpreted "the meanings of theoretical constructions in terms of their manifest functions in identifiable contexts. " Proponent of Naturalism Nagel expounded his naturalism in 1954, in his presidential address before the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. He defined naturalism as "a generalized account of the cosmic scheme and of man's place in it, as well as a logic of inquiry. " Naturalism, to Nagel, was "the executive and causal primacy of matter in the executive order of nature" and "the manifest plurality and variety of things, of their qualities and their functions, . .. [as] an irreducible feature of the universe. " The Structure of Science (1961), heralded as one of the best works in the philosophy of science, examined the logical structure of scientific concepts and evaluated the claims of knowledge in various sciences. Nagel tried to show that the same logic of scientific explanation was valid in all sciences. He viewed the controversy between the descriptive, the realist, and the instrumentalist views of scientific concepts to be simply conflicts over "preferred modes of speech. " Nagel became a University Professor Emeritus in 1970 and remained a special lecturer at Columbia until 1973. In 1980, while receiving Columbia's Nicholas Murray Butler Medal in Gold, he explained his view of philosophy: "Philosophy is in general not a primary inquiry into the nature of things. It is a reflection on the conclusion of those inquiries that may sometimes terminate, as it did in the case of Spinoza, in a clarified vision of man's place in the scheme of things. " Nagel died of pneumonia at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City on September 22, 1985.
( Written for independent study and suitable for an intro...)
( Ernest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy is the first ext...)
(Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific...)
( "Ernest Nagel's work, The Structure of Science, has ear...)
(The Structure of Science Hardcover Jan 01, 1961 Nagel, Er...)
(5½" x 8" x ½" - 118 pages - 2nd impression.)
(From the Introduction. In 1931 there appeared in a Germa...)
Quotations:
"It is the desire for explanations that are at once systematic and controllable by factual evidence that generates science; and it is the organization and classification of knowledge on the basis of explanatory principles that is the distinctive goal of the sciences. "
"Human destiny is an episode between two oblivions. "
"Like Molière's M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The real nature of the tools of their craft has become evident only within recent times A renaissance of logical studies in modern times begins with the publication in 1847 of George Boole's The Mathematical Analysis of Logic. "
He married Edith Haggstrom in 1935; they had two children, Alexander and Sidney.
