The death of Ernest Nagel marks the passing of an internationally known

humanist and philosophical naturalist. Nur-tured in the tradition of his teachers, Morris R. Cohen, F. J. E. Woodbridge, and John Dewey, he devoted his immense intellectual gifts to the detailed study of the methods and logic of the sciences. He concluded early in his career that a rational view of the nature of the world and humankind's place in it could be based only on the tested find-ings of the empirical sciences. Although his intellectual interests spanned a wide variety of areas and disciplines—symbolic logic, the theory of measurement and probability, mathematics, biology, law, and history—he remained faithful to the Democritean-Epicurean tradition that recognized that the emergence, development, and evanescence of consciousness were a function of organized patterns of matter.

Ernest Nagel was not only interested in the development of the sciences; he was a staunch defender of rational methods of inquiry in all areas of human experience against the periodic onslaught of religious and secular repression that sought to impose its views by authoritarian and intolerant methods and by establishing road-blocks to free inquiry. He was convinced by the weight of evidence that there was no rational justi-fication for belief in the existence of disem-bodied mind or spirit, a notion inherent in the religious world-views of the past and present or for the belief that incorporeal entities of any sort exercised a causal influ-ence on the behavior of man or things. Nonetheless he contended, in opposition to some of the reductive materialists of the past, that the scientific outlook did not entail the conclusion that nothing existed but "the movement of atoms in the void" and that the color, variety, and glory of human con-sciousness and culture in all their multiple dimensions were illusions. He accounted for their emergence, novelty, and contextual reality on the basis of the transformations that material things undergo in their inter-actions with each other. Far from impov-erishing the richness of human experience, the scientific study of the causes and conse-quences of phenomena increase our human

power to diversify and, within limits, to con-trol the varieties of experience.

Ernest Nagel never identified the exis-tence and experience of religion with a belief in God or any transcendent being. He re-garded religion as a form of organized social consciousness whose multiple roles in life provided a task for critical cultural and historical study. But refusing to evade issues by professing agnosticism or by coining new and arbitrary meanings for the terms God and immortality, he courageously espoused a philosophical atheism that challenged the whole array of fundamentalist revivals of our time. He was a militant defender of the, values of a liberal civilization, whose validity he defined in terms of their consequences for human weal and woe. He shared many of the aspirations of those who expressed themselves in the language of natural or human rights but, as a naturalist, found no basis for the view that they were grounded logically or ontologically in the nature of things.

The flavor and character of Ernest Nagel's personality are not adequately con-veyed by his sober, severe, and patient analyses of scientific themes or even by the trenchant tone of his critical studies. Those

Ernest Nagel

who had the privilege of knowing him were invariably impressed by his gentle manner and the generous spirit of his intellectual activities. He was a devoted teacher and wise counselor, always available and helpful to those who sought him out. In the republic of letters he greeted everyone as a fellow citizen who abided by the amenities of civil discourse, a respecter of argument as well as of persons, whose only failing was a modesty so deep that it occasionally impeded creative work. For all his intellectual toler-ance, he never let it affect his sense of quality or compromise his allegiance to the first rate.

Ernest Nagel was an ardent champion of intellectual and academic freedom. Despite his gentleness he was in the forefront of the defense of the relative autonomy of the university during the tumultuous sixties, when the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn were imperiled.

Although an admirer of Spinoza, Ernest Nagel was not a Spinozist. He was too much aware of the irreducible pluralism and evils of the world, of the tragic dimensions of time and history, of the possibilities of human disaster as well as of human triumph, to embrace an easy optimism about the future. Yet, in a sense, Ernest Nagel illu- strated what Spinoza called "the intellectual love of God"—not, of course, in terms of conventional theology, which they both rejected, but in his dedication to the things of the mind and to the perennial quest for understanding, which to humanists is the highest form of human spirituality. •

New Laureates Elected.

A meeting of the Academy of Humanism will be held in Oslo, Norway, to coincide with the 1986 Humanist World Congress that will take place August 3-7, 1986.

Six Laureates have been elected to the Academy for 1986. They are: Yves Galifret, professor of physiology at the Sorbonne and director of l'Union Rationaliste; John Gal-tung, professor of sociology at the University of Oslo; Adolf Grünbaum, professor of phi-losophy at the University of Pittsburgh and former president of the American Philo-sophical Association; Richard Leakey, direc-tor of the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi and chairman of the Foundation for Research into the Origins of Man; Max Rood, professor of law and former Minister of Justice in Holland; André Lwolff, Nobel Prize-winner in physiology and professor of science at the College de France.—Steven L. Mitchell

ACADEMY OF HUMANISM NEWS

Ernest Nagel (1901-1985) A Naturalistic Humanist

Sidney Hook

Winter 1985/86

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