ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Ernest Nagel's adoption of logical empiricist commitments was motivated by a problem at the heart of his naturalism. It explains how logic is an effective instrument, one must see how it reflects the underlying "categories" of reality, and so our knowledge of these categories is presupposed in scientific inquiry. The objection focuses more directly on logic itself: Here sees an elegant presentation of the central tension between a metaphysical view of logic and naturalism. Nagel's presidential address offers, then, a conception of analytic philosophy that has at its core a defensible naturalism. Jaegwon Kim misses the aspect of Nagel in his discussion of naturalism in the retrospective essay "The American Origins of Naturalism". Kim aims to present naturalism as the central preoccupation of analytic philosophy: "naturalism as the ruling ideology of analytic philosophy has helped to shape its problems during the second half of the twentieth century".
