Robert Nozick 1938 – 2002

Robert Nozick was an American philosopher and a longtime professor at Harvard. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published in 1974 in part as a response to Rawls's Theory of Justice, defended a libertarian minimal state on the grounds of individual rights and a historical, entitlement-based conception of justice. He also introduced the experience-machine thought experiment against hedonism. His later work ranged widely across epistemology, decision theory, and the meaning of life, in books such as Philosophical Explanations and The Examined Life, marking him as one of the most curious and protean philosophers of his generation.

Robert Nozick was born in 1938 in Brooklyn, the son of a Russian Jewish entrepreneur. He took his first degree at Columbia and his doctorate at Princeton in 1963 under Carl Hempel, with a dissertation on rational choice that anticipated his later work on decision theory. After teaching at Princeton, Harvard, and the Rockefeller University he returned to Harvard, where he was made full professor at the age of thirty and held the Pellegrino University Professorship until his death.

His major works are Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Philosophical Explanations (1981), The Examined Life (1989), The Nature of Rationality (1993), Socratic Puzzles (1997), and Invariances (2001). Anarchy, State, and Utopia, written as a libertarian counter to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, won the National Book Award and made him one of the most widely read political philosophers of his generation.

Nozick defended a minimal night-watchman state, an entitlement theory of justice illustrated by the Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment, and the inviolability of individual rights as Kantian side constraints. His later books moved well beyond political philosophy: the experience machine, the closest-continuer theory of personal identity, and a fallibilist epistemology of explanation are among his lasting contributions. He died of stomach cancer at Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2002.