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Robert Nozick: Philosophical Explanations
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Robert Nozick's philosophical career spanned many subjects - from an exploration of the good life (play, friendship, love, sex) to the nature of truth and objectivity. He is... best known for Anarchy, State and Utopia (Buy It: UK and Europe / US and Canada). It is a work of political philosophy which sets out a case for why only a minimal state can be justified, and which tackles head on John Rawls' Theory of Justice (Buy it: US and Canada / UK and Europe).
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Nozick went on to write many other works of philosophy, including Philosophical Explanations (1981) and The Nature of Rationality (1995). Rarely returning to purely political topics, he remained aloof from the fray of commentary and attacks that Anarchy inspired. Nozick's goal was not to convert people to a viewpoint; as he once wrote, his "mode of philosophy is not designed to induce belief in something or the acceptance of it as true." In his popular work, The Examined Life (1989), he abandoned the limited-state idea expressed in Anarchy, explaining that "it neglected the symbolic importance of an official political concern with issues or problems, as a way of marking their importance or urgency, and hence of expressing, intensifying, channeling, encouraging, and validating our private actions and concerns toward them." In later interviews, Nozick said he still considered himself a libertarian, if not a "hardcore" one. Throughout his career, he remained engaged with the larger libertarian intellectual conversation, citing, quoting, or discussing such thinkers as Israel Kirzner, Julian Simon, and Ayn Rand, none of whom exactly looms large in the intellectual worlds of most academic philosophers
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Nozick, among the leading figures in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, has made significant contributions to almost every major area of philosophy. In Philosophical Explanations, Nozick provides novel accounts of knowledge, free-will, and the nature of value. The Examined Life, pitched to a broader public, explores love, death, faith and the meaning of life. The Nature of Rationality, presents a theory of practical reason that attempts to embellish notoriously spartan classical decision theory. Socratic Questions is a collection of papers that range from Ayn Rand and Austrian economics to animal rights, while his latest production, Invariances applies insights from physics and biology to question of objectivity in such areas as the nature of necessity and moral value.
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Nozick's contribution to the debate over personal identity is his "closest continuer" theory... presented in Philosophical Explanations. Philosophical puzzles over personal identity arise from various bizarre thought experiments that seem to present genuine logical possibilities. For instance, there is Locke's famous example of the prince and the cobbler, wherein the man who wakes up in the cobbler's body one morning appears to have all the memories of the prince, and none of the memories of the cobbler. So who is the man actually in the cobbler's body, the prince or the cobbler himself? Or we can imagine a person A stepping into a teleportation machine of the sort described in science-fiction stories, and, due to some glitch in the machine's operation, not one but two persons similar to A, call them B and C, appearing in the spot where the machine was supposed to send A. Which, if either, is the "real" A?
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Against the conventional wisdom that explanation is irreflexive, Nozick makes a case for explanatory self-subsumption, via quantification theory, of the most fundamental laws. He expands on Kant's strategy of deriving content from form. A principle P could be explanatorily fundamental and explain itself if it presented a characteristic C that all laws possess, in virtue of which they are true. But P itself has the characteristic C. So P is true. Again:
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It is held that Nozick developed his philosophical system as a tract to discourage government regulation of the Kitten Trust while working as a lobbyist. Nozick himself was a Kitten Huffing addict, and wrote the Tao Te Ching while up on kittens for four nights in a row. In it he ... deals with perennial philosophical questions, such as:
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