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Robert Nozick

American political philosopher

Robert Nozick was an American philosopher who taught at Harvard University. He wrote Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a libertarian reply to John Rawls.

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American Born 1938 in Brooklyn, United States Died 2002

Influenced by Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Murray N. Rothbard

Robert Nozick

Books by Robert Nozick

About Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick (1938 to 2002) was born in Brooklyn and studied at Columbia, Princeton and Oxford. He later held a university professorship at Harvard University and served as president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), which responded from a libertarian standpoint to John Rawls's 1971 book A Theory of Justice. In it he argues that a minimal state is the only form of government that can be justified. Nozick also wrote on epistemology, ethics, decision theory, metaphysics and philosophy of mind. His book Philosophical Explanations (1981) set out a counterfactual theory of knowledge and won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. His last book, Invariances, appeared in 2001.

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