Nagel received a BA in philosophy from Cornell University in 1958, where he was a member of the Telluride House and where he was introduced to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He then attended the University of Oxford on a Fulbright Scholarship and received a BPhil in 1960; while there, he studied with J. L. Austin, and H. Paul Grice. He received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963. At Harvard, Nagel studied under John Rawls, whom Nagel later called "the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century."