Some New York Philosophers

The first graduate philosophy courses I had were taken in the late forties at Columbia with Professor Ernest Nagel and dealt with logical theory and philosophy of science. I had been predisposed toward these topics by my earlier studies with, and readings in analytically inclined philosophers and my initial admiration for scientific forms of reasoning. In my undergraduate days, I had been influenced by the teaching of Laurence J. Lafleur, a rationalist philosopher and commentator on Descartes, who wrote on logic and several scientific fields. I had also had courses with the great historian of science, Alexandre Koyré, on the rise of modern science. In my independent reading, I had studied, among other works, Russell’s The Scientific Outlook, 1 A. S. Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World, 2 H. Dingle’s Through Science to Philosophy,3 H. Reichenbach’s From Copernicus to Einstein,4 Susan Stebbing’s Philosophy and the Physicists,5 Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World,6 Tarski’s Introduction to Logic,7 M. R. Cohen’s A Preface to Logic,8 A. E. Murphy’s The Uses of Reason,9 S. Hook’s Reason, Social Myths and Democracy,10 and Cohen and Nagel’s Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method.11