Robert Nozick held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, and was president of the American Philosophical Association.
17 Facts About Robert Nozick
2.
Robert Nozick is best known for his books Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, in which Nozick presented his own theory of utopia as one in which people can freely choose the rules of the society they enter into, and Philosophical Explanations, which included his counterfactual theory of knowledge.
3.
Robert Nozick's mother was born Sophie Cohen, and his father was a Jew from a Russian shtetl who had been born with the name Cohen and who ran a small business.
4.
Robert Nozick died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with stomach cancer.
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Robert Nozick was interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Robert Nozick appealed to the Kantian idea that people should be treated as end in themselves, not merely as a means to an end.
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Robert Nozick rejected the notion of inalienable rights advanced by Locke and most contemporary capitalist-oriented libertarian academics, writing in Anarchy, State, and Utopia that the typical notion of a "free system" would allow adults to voluntarily enter into non-coercive slave contracts.
8.
In Philosophical Explanations, which received the Phi Beta Kappa Society's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Robert Nozick provided novel accounts of knowledge, free will, personal identity, the nature of value, and the meaning of life.
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Robert Nozick put forward an epistemological system which attempted to deal with both the Gettier problem and those posed by skepticism.
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Robert Nozick believed the counterfactual conditionals bring out an important aspect of our intuitive grasp of knowledge: For any given fact, the believer's method must reliably track the truth despite varying relevant conditions.
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Robert Nozick believes that the truth tracking conditions are more fundamental to human intuition than the principle of deductive closure.
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My own view is that Robert Nozick's thinking about these matters evolved over time and that what he wrote at any given time was an accurate reflection of what he was thinking at that time.
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Robert Nozick created the thought experiment of the "utility monster" to show that average utilitarianism could lead to a situation where the needs of the vast majority were sacrificed for one individual.
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Robert Nozick wrote a version of what was essentially a previously known thought experiment, the experience machine, in an attempt to show that ethical hedonism was false.
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Robert Nozick asked us to imagine that "superduper neuropsychologists" have figured out a way to stimulate a person's brain to induce pleasurable experiences.
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Robert Nozick was notable for the exploratory style of his philosophizing and for his methodological ecumenism.
17.
Robert Nozick argues that invariances, and hence objectivity itself, emerged through a theory of evolutionary cosmology across possible worlds.