Nagel was born in Nové Mesto nad Váhom. His mother, Frida Weiss, was from the nearby town of Vrbové. He emigrated to the United States at the age of 10 with his family, and became a U.S. 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 one year at Rockefeller University, he spent his entire academic career at Columbia. He became the first John Dewey Professor of Philosophy there in 1955. And then University Professor from 1967 until his retirement in 1970, after which he continued to teach. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1977. His work concerned the philosophy of mathematical fields such as geometry and probability, quantum mechanics, and the status of reductive and inductive theories of science. His book The Structure of Science practically inaugurated the field of analyticphilosophy of science. He expounded the different kinds of explanation in different fields, and was sceptical about attempts to unify the nature of scientific laws or explanations. He was the first to propose that by positing analytic equivalencies between the terms of different sciences, one could eliminate all ontological commitments except those required by the most basic science. He also upheld the view that social sciences are scientific, and should adopt the same standards as natural sciences. Nagel wrote An Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method with Morris Raphael Cohen, his CCNY teacher in 1934. In 1958, he published with James R. Newman Gödel's proof, a short book explicating Gödel's incompleteness theorems to those not well trained in mathematical logic. He edited the Journal of Philosophy and the Journal of Symbolic Logic. He died in New York. He had two sons, Alexander Nagel and Sidney Nagel. At a meeting of the executive council of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in Denver, Colorado in April 2011, Nagel was selected for inclusion in CSI's Pantheon of Skeptics. The Pantheon of Skeptics was created by CSI to remember the legacy of deceased fellows of CSI and their contributions to the cause of scientific skepticism. Nagel's doctoral students include Morton White, Patrick Suppes, Henry Kyburg, Isaac Levi, and Sidney Morgenbesser.
Books
On The Logic of Measurement
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The Formation of Modern Conceptions of Formal Logic in the Development of Geometry
