Robert Nozick | |
---|---|
Born |
Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
November 16, 1938
Died | January 23, 2002 Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. |
(aged 63)
Alma mater |
Columbia University Princeton University Oxford University |
Era | 20th-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Analytic, Libertarianism |
Main interests
|
Political philosophy, ethics, epistemology |
Notable ideas
|
Utility monster, experience machine, justice as property rights, paradox of deontology, entitlement theory, deductive closure |
Robert Nozick (/ˈnoʊzɪk/; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) 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 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971). His other work involved decision theory and epistemology.
Nozick was born in Brooklyn. His mother was born Sophie Cohen, and his father was a Jew from the Russian shtetl who had been born with the name of Cohen and who ran a small business.
He attended the public schools in Brooklyn. At one point he joined the youth branch of Norman Thomas's Socialist Party. In addition, at Columbia he founded the local chapter of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which in 1962 changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society.
That same year, after receiving his bachelor of arts degree in 1959, he married Barbara Fierer. They had two children, Emily and David. The Nozicks eventually divorced and he remarried, to the poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. He died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with stomach cancer. He was interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.