Robert Nozick
Born 16 November 1938 · Died 23 January 2002
Robert Nozick (/ˈnoʊzɪk/; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University,[3] and was president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for his books Philosophical Explanations (1981), which included his counterfactual theory of knowledge, and Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971), in which Nozick also presented his own theory of utopia as one in which people can freely choose the rules of the society they enter into. His other work involved ethics, decision theory, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His final work before his death, Invariances (2001), introduced his theory of evolutionary cosmology, by which he argues invariances, and hence objectivity itself, emerged through evolution across possible worlds.
Quotes
“When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.”
The Examined Life 1989 “Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality. It is by these means that our lives come to more than what they instrumentally yield. And by meaning more, our lives yield more.”
Chapter V “From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.”
Chapter 7 “You can't satisfy everybody; especially if there are those who will be dissatisfied unless not everybody is satisfied.”
Chapter 10 “There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives.”
Chapter 3
Quotes from Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0), chosen with AI.
Books by Robert Nozick in order
Books by Robert Nozick in the order they were published, from The Normative Theory of Individual Choice (1963) to Invariances (2001).
- 1The Normative Theory of Individual ChoiceThe Normative Theory of Individual Choice1963
- 2Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Anarchy, State, and Utopia1974 - 3Philosophical Explanations
Philosophical Explanations1981 - 4The Examined Life
The Examined Life1989 - 5The Nature of Rationality
The Nature of Rationality1993 - 6The Emergence of Logical Empiricism : From 1900 to the Vienn
The Emergence of Logical Empiricism : From 1900 to the Vienna Circle1996 - 7Socratic Puzzles
Socratic Puzzles1997 - 8Invariances
Invariances2001