Robert Nozick
1938–2002 · American philosopher
“Individual rights are lines you can't cross”
Life and education
- Born
- 16 November 1938, Brooklyn, New York, USA
- Died
- 23 January 2002, Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Education
- Columbia (BA 1959); Princeton (PhD 1963)
- Position
- Harvard from 1969; University Professor
American philosopher whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) started from individual rights to defend a minimal state and made him libertarianism's leading theorist. The book is the most famous reply to his Harvard colleague John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.
He ranged far beyond political philosophy — epistemology, personal identity, rational choice, the meaning of life. His "experience machine" thought experiment, asking whether you'd plug into a machine that only gives you pleasure, is a classic objection to hedonism, and on personal identity he proposed the "closest continuer theory."
Timeline
- 1963PhD, Princeton
- 1969Full professor at Harvard at 30
- 1974Anarchy, State, and Utopia (National Book Award, 1975)
- 1981Philosophical Explanations — closest continuer theory, tracking theory of knowledge
- 1989The Examined Life
- 2001Invariances
Big ideas
If you think like them…
If you're like Nozick, you believe one person's rights come before the majority's interests. You instinctively push back on math that sacrifices individuals for the whole, and you value everyone being in charge of their own life. You also tend to believe your choices are genuinely yours.
Rough positions on the five questions the quiz uses. These simplify each philosopher's actual views and are open to interpretation.
Thought experiments featuring them
Key works
- Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
- Philosophical Explanations (1981)
- The Examined Life (1989)