Robert Nozick

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Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher and Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. Nozick, schooled at Columbia and Princeton, was among the leading figures in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, making significant contributions to almost every major area of philosophy. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) was a libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. He was married to the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg.

Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which garnered a National Book Award the following year, argues 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 were 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 rational beings, 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 later recanted the extreme 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]

In Philosophical Explanations (1981) Nozick provides novel accounts of knowledge, free will, and the nature of value. 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 from Ayn Rand and Austrian economics to animal rights, while his last production, Invariances (2001) 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.

Nozick died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with cancer. His remains are interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Nozick and the Gettier problem

Philosophical Explanations addresses many knotty issues, among them the problem of how to define knowledge in the wake of the work of Edmund Gettier, who had offered convincing counter-examples to the classical Platonic definition.

Nozick offers a review of the (already in 1981 abundant) literature on this subject and then suggests his own solution, called the Truth-Tracking view. Nozick argues that p is an instance of knowledge when:

p is true
S believes p
if p were not true, S would not believe p
if p were true, S would believe p

In other words, Nozick replaces Platonic justification with subjunctive conditionality. Some implications of this replacement are brought out in [2].

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References

Nozick, Robert (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books.
Robinson, Dave & Groves, Judy (2003). Introducing Political Philosophy. Icon Books. ISBN 1-84046-450-X.

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