1. Robert Nozick held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, and was president of the American Philosophical Association.
25 Facts About Robert Nozick
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Robert Nozick is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, in which Nozick proposes his minimal state as the only justifiable form of government.
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Robert Nozick was born in Brooklyn to a family of Jewish descent.
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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.
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At one point, Robert Nozick joined the Young People's Socialist League, and at Columbia University he founded the local chapter of the Student League for Industrial Democracy.
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Robert Nozick began to move away from socialist ideals when exposed to Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, claiming he "was pulled into libertarianism reluctantly" when he found himself unable to form satisfactory responses to libertarian arguments.
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Robert Nozick was initiated into the Alpha-Tau chapter of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity while at Columbia in 1956.
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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 believed that a distribution of goods is just when brought about by free exchange among consenting adults, trading from a baseline position where the principles of entitlement theory are upheld.
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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 individuals to voluntarily enter into non-coercive slave contracts.
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Early sections of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, akin to the introduction of A Theory of Justice, see Robert Nozick implicitly join Rawls's attempts to discredit utilitarianism.
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Robert Nozick takes issue with this as it makes animals "too subordinate" to humans, counter to his view that animals ought to "count for something".
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In Philosophical Explanations, 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 gives four conditions for S's knowing that P :.
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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 introduces his theory of truth, in which he leans towards a deflationary theory of truth, but argues that objectivity arises through being invariant under various transformations.
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Robert Nozick argues that invariances, and hence objectivity itself, emerged through a theory of evolutionary cosmology across possible worlds.
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Some later editions of The Examined Life advertise this fact explicitly in the blurb, saying Robert Nozick "refutes his earlier claims of libertarianism" in one of the book's essays, "The Zigzag of Politics".
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Robert Nozick later claimed to regret doing this, saying he was moved by "intense irritation" with Segal and his legal representatives at the time, and was quoted in an interview saying "sometimes you have to do what you have to do".
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Metcalf then postulates that Robert Nozick felt this was threatened by neoliberal politics.
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Robert Nozick was sometimes admired for the exploratory style of his philosophizing, often content to raise tantalizing philosophical possibilities and then leave judgment to the reader.
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Brennan makes a point of showing how this enabled Robert Nozick to reach surprising conclusions while drawing attention to one of Robert Nozick's more famous quotes which made the headline of his obituary in The Economist, that "there is room for words on subjects other than last words".
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Robert Nozick was notable for drawing from literature outside of philosophy, namely economics, physics, evolutionary biology, decision theory, anthropology, and computer science, amongst other disciplines.