Robert Nozick

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Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher and Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University; he began teaching at Harvard and taught there until his death. Nozick was schooled at Columbia University, Oxford University in England, and Princeton University. He was a prominent as an American political philosopher in the 1970s and 1980s. He did additional but less influential work in such subjects as decision theory and epistemology. His highly influential book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) was a libertarian answer to his Harvard colleague John Rawls' more communitarian defense of a form of social-democratic liberalism, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971.

Life and Work

Nozick was born in Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish entrepreneur from Russia. He was married to the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Nozick died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with cancer. His remains are interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nozick was a prodigious thinker who gained a reputation for brilliance within his chosen field while still in graduate school at Princeton in the early 1960's. He wrote his dissertation on decision theory under the supervision of Carl Hempel. Along with many young intellectuals of that period, he was drawn initially to the politics and socialism of the New Left. But study of the works of the defenders of capitalism and personal liberty, such as F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand, led him to renounce leftist politics and to become concerned philosophically with political theory instead of the technical issues of analytic philosophy. This resulted in his first and most famous book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).

Nozick's book, along with Rawls' A Theory of Justice, revived interent in and study of political philosophy within the American analytic philosophical tradition; political philosophy had been largely neglected within analytic philosophy from the founding of the Vienna Circle until then. Those two books generated a very large philosophical response and discussion, so that political philosophy became a central concern of American philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s and possibly later. Rawls continued work in political theory until his death, but Nozick turned away from political theory and went on to other concerns, so the written response to and discussin of Anarchy, State, and Utopia is very much smaller than that for A Theory of Justice. It seems now, however, that Nozick will be remembered and known for that work much more than for his subsequent work and interests.

In Philosophical Explanations (1981), which received the Phi Beta Kappa Society's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Nozick provided novel accounts of knowledge, free will, personal identity, the nature of value, and the meaning of life. He also put forward an epistemological system that attempted to deal with both Edmund Gettier-style problems and those posed by scepticism. This highly influential argument eschewed justification as a necessary requirement for knowledge.

The Examined Life (1989), pitched to a broader public, explores love, death, faith, reality, and the meaning of life. The Nature of Rationality (1993) presents a theory of practical reason that attempts to embellish notoriously spartan classical decision theory. Socratic Puzzles (1997) is a collection of papers that range in topic from Ayn Rand and Austrian economics to animal rights, while his last book, Invariances, published in 2001 just shortly before his death, applies insights from physics and biology to questions of objectivity in such areas as the nature of necessity and moral value.

Nozick was notable for his curious, exploratory style and methodological ecumenism. Often content to raise tantalizing philosophical possibilities and then leave judgment to the reader, Nozick was also notable for inventively drawing from literature outside of philosophy (e.g., economics, physics, evolutionary biology) to infuse his work with freshness and relevance.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Anarchy, State, and Utopia garnered a National Book Award the following year after its publication. In it Nozick argued

among other things, that a distribution of goods is just, so long as the distribution was brought about by free exchanges by consenting adults and was made from a just starting position, even if large inequalities emerge from the process. Nozick appealed to the Kantian idea that people should be treated as ends (what he termed 'separateness of persons'), not merely as a means. For example, forced redistribution of income treated people as if they were merely sources of money. Nozick here challenges John Rawls's arguments in A Theory of Justice that conclude that just inequalities in distribution must benefit the least well off. Nozick himself recanted the libertarian views he had earlier expressed in Anarchy, State, and Utopia in one of his later books, The Examined Life, calling those views "seriously inadequate." In a 2001 interview, however, he clarified his position: "What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated." [1]

Writings

• Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (2001/2003) ISBN 0-674-01245-3
• Socratic Puzzles (1997) ISBN 0-674-81653-6
• The Nature of Rationality (1993/1995) ISBN 0-691-02096-5
• The Examined Life (1989) ISBN 0-671-72501-7
• Philosophical Explanations (1981) ISBN 0-19-824672-2
• Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974/2001) ISBN 0-631-19780-X

See also

• Liberalism
• Contributions to liberal theory
• Libertarianism
• Minarchism

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Basic Books, 1974, reprinted with a new forward, 2006. ISBN 0465002706
• Robinson, Dave & Groves, Judy, Introducing Political Philosophy, Icon Books, 2003. ISBN 1-84046-450-X.

External links

• Obituary by The Daily Telegraph
• Obituary by The Guardian
• Obituary by The Independent
• Philosopher Nozick dies at 63 From the Harvard Gazette
• Robert Nozick Memorial minute
• Robert Nozick (1938-2002) by Edward Feser
• A summary of the political philosophy of Robert Nozick by R. N. Johnson
• Robert Nozick, Libertarianism, And Utopia by Jonathan Wolff
• Nozick on Newcomb's Problem and Prisoners' Dilemma by S. L. Hurley
• Robert Nozick: Against Distributive Justice by R.J. Kilcullen
• Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism? by Robert Nozick
• Open Directory Project - Robert Nozick directory category
• Robert Nozick, Philosopher of Liberty by Roderick T. Long

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