Teleology Revisited and Other Essays in the Philosophy and History of Science.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1979 Stock Code: 123053
Inscribed to Carl Hempel
First edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed from the author to Carl Hempel on the front free endpaper: "To Peter, in admiration and with love, Ernest". Both Nagel (1901-1985) and Hempel were central to the logical positivist movement, along with Popper and Kaplan, though Nagel supported Hempel's gradual turn towards logical empiricismduring the 1940s; their essays on functional analysis and explanation, in particular, are considered classics in their field (Nagel, The Structure of Science 1961; Hempel, "The Logic of Functional Analysis" 1965).Carl Gustav Hempel (1905-1997), known as "Peter" to his friends, was a German writer and philosopher, and a major figure in logical empiricism. Willard Van Orman Quine explained the nickname: Rudolf Carnap's second wife, Elizabeth Ina Stöger, "called Carnap Peterli for no apparent reason, and Eva Hempel's first wife called Hempel Peter on similar grounds; but Eva protested that she had been doing it first, and that the ambiguity was intolerable. Ina acceded, and called Carnap Carnap thenceforward. Hempel has been Peter to all of us ever since" (Quine in Dialogue, p. 144).
Nagel was John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia from 1955 to 1966; the series of lectures that he gave as part of the Dewey Lecture series is printed here as the two-part titular essay, "Teleology Revisited", accompanied by eleven additional essays.
Description
Octavo. Original brown buckram, spine lettered in black. With dust jacket.
Condition
Ink annotation to front free endpaper: "Review by Peter Lipton in BJPS [British Journal for the Philosophy of Science] Vol 33, No 2, June 1982, pp. 186-194". Some neat underlining in ink to contents page and the essay "The Quest for Uncertainty", likely by Hempel, who habitually annotated his copies similarly. A fine copy in the lightly chipped and creased dust jacket, spine sunned and with one closed tear to top edge of rear panel.
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