Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick | |
|---|---|
Nozick in 1977 | |
| Born | November 16, 1938 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | January 23, 2002 (aged 63) Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Education | |
| Education | Columbia University (BA) Princeton University (PhD) Oxford University |
| Doctoral advisors | Carl Gustav Hempel |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic Libertarianism |
| Main interests | Political philosophy, ethics, epistemology |
| Notable ideas | Utility monster, experience machine, entitlement theory of justice, night-watchman state, Nozick's Lockean proviso, Wilt Chamberlain argument, paradox of deontology, deductive closure, Nozick's four conditions on knowledge, rejection of the principle of epistemic closure |
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Robert Nozick (/ˈnoʊzɪk/; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, and was president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971), in which Nozick proposes his minimal state as the only justifiable form of government. His later work Philosophical Explanations (1981) advanced notable epistemological claims, namely his counterfactual theory of knowledge. It won Phi Beta Kappa society's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award the following year.
Nozick's 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.