Sovereignty of Reason

...and while acknowledging that a given social science may possess its own conceptual techniques of investigation, he insists that scientific method, as a method for understanding empirical phenomena, is unitary...

...Or, put in other words, "no statement detached from the symbolic system to which it is integral can be evaluated for its empirical validity...

...In the late Thirties there occurred a change in the cultural and political climate which was paralleled by a shift in prevailing philosophical currents...

...A revival of interest in religious philosophy saw idealism take the offensive and proclaim the inadequacies of naturalism to do justice to ethical values and human experience...

...And Professor Nagel establishes the legitimacy of that sovereignty by faithfully respecting the methods of science through which warranted knowledge is won and by showing a sensitive appreciation for the data of experience that provide science, and ultimately philosophy, with their subject matter...

...The recommendation to use scientific method is the recommendation of a way for deciding issues of factual validity and adequacy...

...For over two decades, students at Columbia University, where he is John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, have admired the sympathetic breadth of his interests, the firm rigor of his analyses, and the clarity of his expositions...

...On this view, logic is not descriptive of reality...

...Logic Without Metaphysics, on the other hand, celebrates the primacy of the human intellect...

...But Professor Nagel's eontextualism qualifies his naturalism and leads him to a parting of the ways with many who otherwise share his general orientation...

...that there is an irreducible plurality of things, qualities and processes in the world...

...nor does he intend to exclude artistic and religious experience as contexts in which inspiration and belief may arise...

...This does not mean that Nagel denies or wishes to deny the importance of emotion, intuition and insight as sources of wisdom...

...Such a dichotomy is untenable, he maintains...

...They reflect, unfortunately or not, attitudes, evaluations and commitments that provide broad options of choice and interpretation, not easily coerced by reality, and which if anything are a tribute to the frailty of human nature...

...and a not inconsiderable number of thinkers have made widely popular various revised forms of older religious and irrationalistic philosophies as a guide to human salvation...

...nor does it adumbrate the ontologic structure of this world or other possible worlds...

...What he means by naturalism is best stated in his own words: we became persuaded that spatio-temporally organized bodies are the only agents of causal change...

...Existentialism, dominant on the continent of Europe, left a strong impress on America...

...and no isolated concept can be judged as warranted on the basis of the essentially irrelevant criterion of pictorial suggestive-ness...

...When Professor Nagel began his teaching career at Columbia in the early Thirties, pragmatism or pragmatic naturalism was unquestionably the reigning American philosophy...

...The force of this qualification is implicit in the title of the book, and is explicitly discussed in his well known essay "Logic Without Ontology," which treats of Nagel's conception of the role of pure logic (and mathematics) in scientific inquiry...

...Nagel disagrees emphatically with those who argue from the alleged uniqueness of historical events and the irreducible qualitative immediacies of human experience and emotion to an unbridgeable gap separating modes of knowledge in the natural and social sciences...

...that the validity of moral standards is a function of their congruence with the de facto physical, biological and social needs of human beings...

...In different ways this trend continued into the postwar period...

...If for many of us time has still not diminished the persuasive logic of that philosophy, the shifting winds of doctrine have tempered the optimism we had in the possibility that science would point the way to a better and more humane civilization and have made us more acutely aware that the conflicts between different schools of philosophy are as perennial as the problems around which conflict centers...

...that the manifest characters of things are not the illusory appearances of a metaphysically superior reality...

...Confusion results and error multiplies when "ideas which are perfectly intelligible within the context in which they have an operational meaning are isolated from such contexts and viewed as substantial beings...

...These qualities are abundantly evident in the present volume, which offers a collection of essays and book reviews that Professor Nagel published in philosophical journals and elsewhere over the past quarter of a century...

...For what is at stake in this distinction is the question how "claims to knowledge and wisdom may be warranted...

...The impact of positivism, imported from Europe, was for a time shattering on the American philosophic scene...

...Moreover, the status of the conceptual tools by means of which we organize the data of a given field of knowledge must be appraised in the context of the specific discipline for which they were developed...

...Professor Nagel terms the variety of naturalism he espouses "contex-tualistic naturalism...

...This is so because many philosophies are concerned with much more than consistency, validity and truth...

...that the various patterns of change discoverable in the world are not fragments of a directively organized, rationally integrated developmental schema...

...that the human scene is but a passing incident in the history of the cosmos...

...The intersecting influences of John Dewey and the radical empiricists may be detected in this view of the nature of logic and other tools of inquiry, but Dewey's influence is even more discernible in Nagel's approach to the problem of the scope of scientific method and its relevance to the social sciences...

...But, vocabulary apart, the differences between positivists and pragmatists were largely negotiable...

...As a collection, the book naturally lacks the organic unity we might expect to find in a systematically developed philosophical treatise...

...The two schools reached a tolerable modus vivendi, and a positivistic naturalism placed other philosophies on the defensive...

...Even the pragmatists, with whom the positivists had much in common, reacted guiltily to the charge of "meaninglessness" which positivism freely hurled at other philosophers...

...Many became convinced, as Nagel puts it, "that the progress and spread of science and the consequent secularization of society are the prime sources of our present ills...

...rather, it is instrumental to the acquisition of warranted knowledge, and its specific role is to help "order the conceptions we form of things by serving as rules for the systematic organization, articulation and transformation of discourse...

...The approach defined by this summary statement would probablv be acceptable to all who consider themselves naturalists...

...It thus offers the general reader a valuable introduction to some of the main problems of contemporary philosophy...

...It presents a conception in which reason is sovereign...

...that the moral worth of an ideal is determined by its capacity to organize and liberate human energies, and not by its origins that evidence drawn from observation and experiment must be available to warrant beliefs about what occurs in the world...

...This reviewer, who studied under Professor Nagel in the Thirties, recalls how irresistibly persuasive naturalism appeared to him and to fellow students...

...Ernest Nagel is one of the most distinguished exponents of philosophical naturalism in this country...

...But it is imperative to distinguish between having experience and having knowledge or between undergoing experience and undertaking the enterprise of acquiring knowledge...

...but this limitation is offset by the variety of its riches and by the accessibility of style and treatment to the layman...

...it is not the recommendation of an exclusive way in which the universe may be confronted and experienced...