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| Author | Robert Nozick |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Philosophy |
| Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Publication date | 1997 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 400 |
| ISBN | 0-674-81653-6 |
Socratic Puzzles is a 1997 collection of essays by the philosopher Robert Nozick.
Nozick disclaims the title "political philosopher" and characterizes his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) as "an accident" that came about because he was "getting nowhere" working on the problem of free will. He discusses his reverence for Socrates, and his intellectual debts to Sidney Morgenbesser and Carl Hempel. At "the most consequential party I ever attended," someone told him about a problem posed by a physicist in California, William Newcomb. Nozick brought this problem into the literature of decision theory ("rational choice theory"). He describes the influence of decision theory on Anarchy, State, and Utopia's derivation of the state from individuals' actions, and its game-theoretic analysis of utopia; and especially in The Nature of Rationality (1993), where he proposed a "decision value" alternative to maximizing expected utility and also extended decision theory to issues about rational belief.
He concludes the introduction by talking about philosophy as a way of life. Although "being philosophical" in the ordinary sense wasn't his motivation for entering philosophy, he found himself being philosophical when diagnosed with stomach cancer and informed about the dire statistics, adding parenthetically an anecdote about the operation in which much of his stomach was removed,
I maintain it was not a complaint when the first words I said to the surgeons upon coming up from anaesthesia after seven hours were, "I hope we don't have to do this again. I don't have the stomach for it."
Nietzsche's demand, that you should lead a life you would be willing to repeat infinitely often, seems "a bit stringent", but philosophy constitutes a way of life worth continuing to its end. Nozick did exactly that, according to his friend Alan Dershowitz. [1]
Hedonism refers to a family of theories, all of which have in common that pleasure plays a central role in them. Psychological or motivational hedonism claims that human behavior is determined by desires to increase pleasure and to decrease pain. Normative or ethical hedonism, on the other hand, is not about how we actually act but how we ought to act: we should pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Axiological hedonism, which is sometimes treated as a part of ethical hedonism, is the thesis that only pleasure has intrinsic value. Applied to well-being or what is good for someone, it is the thesis that pleasure and suffering are the only components of well-being. These technical definitions of hedonism within philosophy, which are usually seen as respectable schools of thought, have to be distinguished from how the term is used in everyday language, sometimes referred to as "folk hedonism". In this sense, it has a negative connotation, linked to the egoistic pursuit of short-term gratification by indulging in sensory pleasures without regard for the consequences.
Robert Nozick 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 books Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971), in which Nozick also presented his own theory of utopia as one in which people can freely choose the rules of the society they enter into, and Philosophical Explanations (1981), which included his counterfactual theory of knowledge. His 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.
A Theory of Justice is a 1971 work of political philosophy and ethics by the philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) in which the author attempts to provide a moral theory alternative to utilitarianism and that addresses the problem of distributive justice. The theory uses an updated form of Kantian philosophy and a variant form of conventional social contract theory. Rawls's theory of justice is fully a political theory of justice as opposed to other forms of justice discussed in other disciplines and contexts.
The state of nature, in moral and political philosophy, religion, social contract theories and international law, is the hypothetical life of people before societies came into existence. Philosophers of the state of nature theory deduce that there must have been a time before organized societies existed, and this presumption thus raises questions such as: "What was life like before civil society?"; "How did government first emerge from such a starting position?," and; "What are the hypothetical reasons for entering a state of society by establishing a nation-state?".
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.
Libertarianism is one of the main philosophical positions related to the problems of free will and determinism which are part of the larger domain of metaphysics. In particular, libertarianism is an incompatibilist position which argues that free will is logically incompatible with a deterministic universe. Libertarianism states that since agents have free will, determinism must be false.
Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a 1974 book by the American political philosopher Robert Nozick. It won the 1975 US National Book Award in category Philosophy and Religion, has been translated into 11 languages, and was named one of the "100 most influential books since the war" (1945–1995) by the UK Times Literary Supplement.
Ted Honderich is a Canadian-born British professor of philosophy, who was Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London.
Norwood Russell Hanson was an American philosopher of science. Hanson was a pioneer in advancing the argument that observation is theory-laden — that observation language and theory language are deeply interwoven — and that historical and contemporary comprehension are similarly deeply interwoven. His single most central intellectual concern was the comprehension and development of a logic of discovery.
Philosophy and economics studies topics such as public economics, behavioural economics, rationality, justice, history of economic thought, rational choice, the appraisal of economic outcomes, institutions and processes, the status of highly idealized economic models, the ontology of economic phenomena and the possibilities of acquiring knowledge of them.
Entitlement theory is a theory of distributive justice and private property created by Robert Nozick in chapters 7 and 8 of his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The theory is Nozick's attempt to describe "justice in holdings" —or what can be said about and done with the property people own when viewed from a principle of justice.
The Lockean proviso is a feature of John Locke's labor theory of property which states that whilst individuals have a right to homestead private property from nature by working on it, they can do so only "at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others".
Jonathan Wolff is a British philosopher and academic. He was Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London in 2012–16.
The labor theory of property is a theory of natural law that holds that property originally comes about by the exertion of labor upon natural resources. The theory has been used to justify the homestead principle, which holds that one may gain whole permanent ownership of an unowned natural resource by performing an act of original appropriation.
"Instrumental" and "value rationality" are terms scholars use to identify two ways humans reason when coordinating group behaviour to maintain social life. Instrumental rationality recognizes means that "work" efficiently to achieve ends. Value rationality recognizes ends that are "right," legitimate in themselves.
The experience machine or pleasure machine is a thought experiment put forward by philosopher Robert Nozick in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It is an attempt to refute ethical hedonism by imagining a choice between everyday reality and an apparently preferable simulated reality.
Philosophical Explanations is a 1981 metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical treatise by the philosopher Robert Nozick.
Invariances is a 2001 book by American philosopher Robert Nozick, his last book before his death in 2002.
The Examined Life is a 1989 collection of philosophical meditations by the philosopher Robert Nozick. The book drew a number of critical reactions. The work is drawn partially as a response to Socrates assertion in Plato's "The Apology of Socrates" that the unexamined life is one not worth living
A Theory of Justice: The Musical is a musical comedy by Eylon Levy, Ramin Sabi, Tommy Peto and Toby Huelin. Billed as a "time-travelling romp through 2,500 years of political philosophy", the musical tells a fictionalised account of the writing of A Theory of Justice (1971), the classic philosophical treatise by the American political philosopher John Rawls.