Talk:Robert Nozick

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Contents

[edit] Citation

Someone should add the citation to PE (1981) in the bibio.

Nate: I was the original poster and also the author of the liberty guide article on Nozick, and IHS encourages duplication, so no worries of copyright infringement. -- Will Wilkinson

[edit] Repudiation of libertarianism

Didn't Nozick eventually repudiate his own libertarian views in favor of a Rawlsian liberalism? :)

Haha. Nice try. "What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated." [1] --zenohockey 18:56, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Professorship

Um ... shouldn't it say that he was a professor of philosophy? There are such things as professors of other subjects, after all, even if those who spend all their time studying one subject may sometimes forget that. Michael Hardy 20:01 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

He held a University Professorship at Harvard; these chairs are not connected to particular schools, departments or subjects. "Pellegrino University Professor" was his actual title. Similar positions exist at Columbia and MIT (where they are called "Institute Professorships") among others, and none of them modify the title by adding "of" anything.

[edit] Copyvio

Removed possible copyright infringement. Text that was previously posted here is the same as text that was previously on this webpage:

http://www.libertyguide.com/lol/nozick.html
Now cached at: http://google.com/search?q=cache:w_vP675aLvgC:www.libertyguide.com/lol/nozick.html&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

To the poster: If there was permission to use this material under terms of our license or if you are the copyright holder of the externally linked text, then please indicate so.

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--Nate 15:19 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

[edit] Broken link

The link to http://www.warwick.ac.uk/staff/S.L.Hurley/NNPDD.htm is broken -- there is an article with a similar title at http://www.warwick.ac.uk/staff/S.L.Hurley/papers/antnpdd.pdf. Don't know whether to link to that and whether to change the text of the link to reflect the slightly different title. Fpahl 23:19, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

I've made this change now. Fpahl 17:48, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] MOS concerns

I reverted/changed some of the recent changes. The style manual on dashes suggests using ndashes for date ranges. While Nozick is mainly known for his libertarian views, he was (as the article goes on to say) a philosopher of many things, not a philosopher of libertarianism. His contributions to the theory of libertarianism are adequately treated in the article; I don't think this restrictive label in the first sentence does him justice. (I also don't like the style of starting a sentence with a comma-separated description of someone, especially if that someone is not the grammatical subject of the sentence -- but that's another matter :-) Fpahl 18:02, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Dead links

  1. About Nozick's critique of John Rawls
  2. Two Conceptions of Justice

Both links are dead...

[edit] Can't Find Loretta Torrago and Her Article, "Two Conceptions of Justice"

I had to remove the following external link

Two Conceptions of Justice compares Nozick's and Rawls's theories of justice

because it no longer works. The link pointed to an Iowa State server, but I can't find any pages by or about her at that university. Some parts of the web seem to suggest she may be an adjunct professor in philosophy and religious studies at Iowa State, but she's not listed on State's official web page for the department. And I can't find the article anywhere else on the web either.

If anyone else knows how to find it, that'd be neat. But I think I'm giving up.

--Ryguasu 23:03, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

He's not listed on the American Philosophers page. I couldn't work out how to do this. Can someone else?


Using webarchive.org, I found an archived copy of Two Conceptions of Justice at http://web.archive.org/web/20030403231428/http://www.public.iastate.edu/~ltorrago/nozick.html If possible, I would suggest someone mirror it the permission of the author.

I was a student of Torrago's in the Spring of 2003 at Iowa State. She had a baby that semester, and I don't think she came back after that. I believe "Lecturer" was her official title while she was there. --Aplarsen 04:50, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fourth subjunctive conditional for knowledge

I'm reading Nozick's "Knowledge and Scepticism" and it seems patent that there are four, not three conditions for knowledge, the fourth being that (4) if p were true, S would believe it. Or, phrased differently later on, after the discussion on differing methods for arriving at a belief about p, (4) If p were true and S were to use M to arrive at a belief whether (or not) p, then S would believe, via M, that p.

Did Nozick abandon this position, and is that why the article lists only three conditions?

To my knowledge, he did not abandon it. It should be included, since it was an important condition to avoid certain obscure counter-examples: such as the example of the person strapped into the matrix, where the matrix is telling their brain that they are in the matrix. --Ryan Delaney talk 00:43, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Nozick and Objectivist philosophy???

As far as I know, Nozick did not adhere to the Randian philosophy stuff, and actually criticised it. I would like to see evidence before he is categorised as an "Objectivist scholar". -- Palthrow 14:35, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

You're right, he didn't adhere to it; the category is "ObjectivisM Scholars" not "ObjectivisT scholars"; it's for people who have written about Objectivism in an academic context, whether or not they agree with it. Look at the category. LaszloWalrus

it doesn't matter, this is consensus. what is going on with that category anyway? it doesn't seem to fit the philosophy categorization schemes... where did it come from? --Buridan 04:36, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
It is the result of POV pushing by an aggressive Ayn Randian. He wants to label everyone who has discussed Ayn Rand with this category, obviously to exaggerate Rand's (very poor) academic reputation. Just yesterday, I dissuaded the user from categorizing Camille Paglia in the way, a literary critic who has only mentioned Rand a few times in the thousands of pages that she has written. — goethean ॐ 15:28, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 'Epistemological theory' removed from page

This addition to the article needs a copyedit and a reference. The copyedit will be easy. Perhaps someone knows something about Nozick's epistemological views and where he wrote abuot them and could add extra information and a reference, then put it back on the page? Anarchia 21:21, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Epistemological Theory

Nozick said that conditions that make S's true belief that p counts as knowledge are the counts factuals (a) P were not ture, S wouldent believe it. P were still true in somewhat different circumstances S, would still believe it, and not believe that not P. Just lookup Gettier