Nozick, Robert (1938–2002)

1. Introduction

Robert Nozick was born in Brooklyn and studied at Columbia and Princeton Universities. He has taught at Harvard since 1969, and was appointed Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy in 1985.

Although he first came to prominence with two papers published in 1969, ‘Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice’ and ‘Coercion’, Nozick’s first book (his defence of libertarianism), Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), is considered his most important work to date. This was followed by Philosophical Explanations (1981), The Examined Life (1989) (in which he remarks that he no longer considers himself to be a libertarian) and The Nature of Rationality (1993).

Nozick’s eclecticism is accompanied by a particularly engaging writing style. He regrets the increasingly technical turn taken by recent intellectual work and does much to make his own research accessible to a general readership without compromising its philosophical content. His openness appears in another way also: Nozick is often the first to point out the difficulties with his own position, believing that ‘there is room for words on subjects other than last words’ (1974: xii). Yet, in his search to break new ground he rarely returns to a subject to answer critics or to fill in the gaps he admits are exposed.