Popular Analytic Philosophy?

Gavagai?

Jim Holt begins the latest post to the New York Times philosophy blog, The Stone, with the following questions:  "Is philosophy literature? Do people read philosophy for pleasure?"  His immediate answer is, I think, more or less correct, "Of course it is, and of course they do." What makes Holt's post (and the edited version of it that appeared in yesterday's print edition of the Times) more controversial and potentially interesting is his second set of questions: "Does anybody read analytic philosophy for pleasure? Is this kind of philosophy literature?"

But the rest of Holt's post confines itself to the second of these two questions, taking a definition from Evelyn Waugh of literature as "the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance,” which Waugh further defined as involving "lucidity, elegance, and individuality."  Holt makes a perfectly fair case that at least some analytic philosophy is lucid, elegant, and individual, and thus (at least according to Waugh), literature.  Fair enough.

But does anyone, other than analytic philosophers, in fact read analytic philosophy for pleasure?  Holt's utter silence on this question is telling.



A few months ago, I blogged about the myth of the accessibility of academic history.  I don't think most academic history commands -- or need command -- a sizable non-academic audience.  To the extent that we expect or demand that it should, we do our field a disservice. Nevertheless, if the accessibility of academic history is a myth, it is a valuable one.  As I wrote then, "the notion that one should write as if one were addressing a literate, general audience helps historians counteract the tendency of academic discourses to get ever more abstruse and hermetic."

But if the popular market for academic history is frequently exaggerated, the popular market for analytic philosophy is entirely imaginary...which may account for the fact that Holt doesn't even attempt to answer his question about its existence.

Indeed, the reach of analytic philosophy within the academic world beyond the philosophy department is slight.  To take an example close to home: the failure of U.S. intellectual historians to grapple sufficiently with analytic philosophy, both as an object of historical study and as a potential font of theoretical insight, has been a fairly frequent topic of discussion at the U.S. Intellectual History Conference and on this blog.

It is telling that Holt follows his first set of questions (about philosophy in general) with a paragraph about actual, human behavior:

People savor the aphorisms of Nietzsche, the essays of Schopenhauer, the philosophical novels of Sartre. They read the dialogues of Plato (and they would doubtless read the dialogues of Aristotle too, had Western civilization not been so careless as to mislay them). Some even claim to enjoy the more daunting treatises in the philosophical canon. “When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest,” Bertie Wooster swankily announces in one of P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” novels.

But Holt gives analytic philosophy only a rather theoretical defense of its literary virtues.  It's hard not to see Jim Holt as simply changing the subject from the question of whether an audience exists for analytic philosophy to whether, at some abstract level, an audience ought to exist.

When it comes to literary qualities, Willard Quine is not Plato or Friedrich Nietzsche, but I don't think Holt has to prove that he is.  Those who've read, say, Word and Object, know that Quine could certainly turn a phrase and could write very clearly about complicated and potentially abstruse issues.  I have no problem whatsoever seeing Word and Object as a literary work (in Waugh's sense).

Yet, it is also true that very, very few people read Word and Object (which is one of the great classics of analytic epistemology, for what it's worth) outside philosophy classes.  And Quine is hardly even a household name.

Compare and contrast Quine to John Dewey.  Nobody, I think, has ever tried to make a case for Dewey as a prose stylist. Indeed, his turgid writing famously prompted Oliver Wendell Holmes to declare that Dewey wrote "as God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was.”  And yet Dewey was a household name, with enormous intellectual purchase beyond philosophy and beyond the academy.  Indeed, plenty of philosophers who've enjoyed enormous influence and popularity have been difficult or even poor writers. Hegel and Heidegger are two examples that spring to mind.

Yes, people savor the literary qualities of well-written philosophy. But people read philosophy because they think they are going to learn something about "big questions": how the world is, how we understand the world, how to live a good life, how to identify (or bring about) a good society, and so forth.  I think people beyond philosophy departments remain interested in these questions. But, for decades, they generally haven't much been interested in the kind of answers that Anglo-American philosophy departments have given to them.  Why they haven't is an interesting question. But I suspect the problem has little to do with whether or not Saul Kripke, David Lewis, or John Searle are good prose stylists.

Tim's Light Reading (3-15-2012): Gretel Adorno, Richard Theodore Greener, Ontics, Defending First Principles, and Tony Judt via Jennifer Homans

1. Gretel Adorno: Just A Stenographer?

Martin Jay reviews Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Towards a New Manifesto, freshly translated by Rodney Livingstone, and hints at some interesting questions about Gretel Adorno's role [right, 1] in the life her husband and his famous conversation partner. Here are some sample passages from the opening of the review (bolds mine):

Gretel Adorno was a remarkable woman about whom far too little is known.[1] Although the recent publication of her correspondence with Walter Benjamin has confirmed the impression that she was a formidable intellect in her own right, she remains largely a mystery.[2] What we do know for certain is that she was deeply devoted to her husband Theodor, whom she married in September, l937. Abandoning a career as a chemist to support his work unreservedly, she seems to have been resigned to his extra-marital affairs, and was so despondent after his death in August, l969 that she made a botched suicide attempt. Among the many services she rendered was the dutiful taking of minutes from the intellectual discussions he thought worth recording. Beginning in March of l938, shortly after his emigration to America and full integration into the life of the Institut für Sozialforschung (then resettled in New York), she wrote down a number of conversations he had with the director of the Institute, Max Horkheimer.[3] She continued to play this role well after they all returned to Frankfurt in the early l950s to reestablish the Institute. ...

It is worth remembering Gretel Adorno's role in their preparation, and not only because it reminds us of the asymmetrical gender relations that prevailed at the Institute (which never had a major female presence in its ranks). Without a tape recorder, she was responsible for faithfully putting down a highly abstract conversation developing at breakneck speed -- the editorial foreword rightly calls it "a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms, and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous" -- and it has to be accounted a minor miracle that anything coherent survived at all. If we add the tendentious title introduced by the publishers, which turn a relatively minor moment in the dialogue into its telos, it is clear that we have a text that cannot be understood as the polished reflections of authors who wanted these formulations to represent their considered opinions for public consumption. ...

And yet, however gingerly we have to treat them as hasty and undercooked pronunciamentos, they do provide a fascinating snapshot of the concerns of the major Frankfurt School theoreticians at a critical moment in their development. For this, Gretel Adorno's stenographic skills have to be acknowledged with gratitude....

And the final paragraph of the review [Theodor and Gretel right, 2]:

Collective political action is impossible at the present time, they conclude, and so are personal relations that try to avoid the gravitational pull of the bourgeois order. Even women's desire to "acquire the right to dispose of their own bodies" is tied up with the idea that "human beings become their own property." (28) The belief that love is a viable refuge or meaningful alternative is therefore sadly mistaken: "Love probably contains the false negation of bourgeois society," Horkheimer avers. And Adorno responds, "it negates it in an impotent fashion, perpetuating it through its negation." (28) What, we might wonder in conclusion, was Gretel Adorno thinking as she recorded these sour thoughts?

Indeed. So we are left to wonder: Was Gretel Adorno merely a stenographer? Did she transcribe literally, or did she translate for meaning? Are the conversations of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer "hasty and undercooked pronunciamentos" because or in spite of her best efforts to make sense of them?

Read the rest of Martin Jay's intriguing review here. I would say this book and these conversations go toward our larger understand of how Marx and Critical Theory work in America.


2. Artifacts of Richard Theodore Greener (1844-1922), Harvard Class of 1870, Discovered in Attic

The story is here. Here are some pertinent passages from the story (bolds and links mine):

Hidden in the attic that McDonald was contracted to clear before the home’s 2009 demolition was a trunk. Inside were the papers of Richard T. Greener [picture from Wikipedia], the first African American to graduate from Harvard.

“I didn’t know who he was,” said McDonald, 51. “But as soon as I found out, I knew this was a story that had to be told.”

Historians thought the documents were lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake because Greener had passed through at the time. They were astonished to learn in the past week that Greener’s 1870 Harvard diploma — water-damaged but intact — his law license, photos and papers connected to his diplomatic role in Russia and his friendship with President Ulysses S. Grant have survived.

“It gives me gooseflesh,” said Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who leads Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American Research. “Greener was a leading intellectual of his time. It’s a remarkable discovery.”

His graduation blazed a trail for black Harvard intellectuals including Gates’ friend, President Barack Obama, the professor added. “He was the voice before DuBois and the president’s predecessor.”

As Ben Alpers noted on the USIH Facebook page, this passage from later in the story is amazing for its, um, lack of perspective: Gates — known for his 2009 “beer summit” on the White House lawn with President Obama and a Cambridge cop who arrested him on his own doorstep — says he would “love to bring the artifacts to Harvard.” ...That's ALL for which Gates is known?! ;)

But do read the rest of the story for what it reveals about Greener's life: born in Philadelphia, son of a slave, enrolled in Harvard in 1865 as an experiment courtesy of white sponsors, appointed philosophy professor in 1873 at the University of South Carolina, survived assassination attempt, had six children, became Howard University Law School dean, friend and rival of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, Russian ambassador under President McKinley, and on and on.


3. NYT's The Stone: Entry #1

In this post Colin McGinn [right, 3] argues that the term "philosophy" is outdated in relation to what current professional "philosophers" do. Because practitioners today no longer "love wisdom" in the way the ancients did, and because today's "philosophers" do no study human culture, McGinn argues for "ontical science" or just "ontics." And professional philosophers would become "onticists."

For my part, I have often thought that today's intellectual historians---especially those with a humanities view of the field---hew more closely to the traditional view of philosopher than today's professional onticists. Think about the works of the best intellectual historians in relation to those most respected in analytic philosophy. Or, more empirically (when possible), try arguing or discussing anything with a rigorous analytic philosopher. They will quickly translate your words into incomprehensible symbolic logic that subverts natural speech---both conversational and narrative. Rather than discussing grey areas and ambiguity, your conversation will become a pissing contest of binary code: 1000100111010110001. The discussion will become a logic game rather than a dialectic about the human condition.


4. NYT's The Stone: Entry #2

Michael P. Lynch [immediate right] and Alan Sokal [down and right] exchange thoughts on "Defending Science." Apart from the epistemelogical contest between science and religion, I found these opening paragraphs fascinating in relation to discussions about foundational and antifoundational philosophy (bolds mine):

Debates over epistemic principles sound abstract, but they have enormous practical repercussions. For instance, in order to decide policy matters (like what to put in our textbooks and what to teach in science classrooms) we need to decide on the facts.

But in order to decide on the facts, we need to decide on the best ways for knowing about those facts. And to do that, we need to agree on our epistemic principles. If we can’t, stalemate ensues. Each side looks at the other as if they inhabit a completely different world — and in a sense, they do.

So it is perplexing, even worrying, that debates over really fundamental epistemic principles can seem irresolvable. The problem is that you can’t defend first principles without presupposing them — that is what makes them “first” principles. As a result, when debates reach this point, they can seem rationally irresolvable. We can’t defend our principles without arguing in a circle.

The problem of justifying first epistemic principles is very old. It led the ancient Greek skeptics to say that knowledge is an illusion. But over the centuries, it has been more common to draw a different conclusion, one concerning the relative value of reason itself. According to many people, what the problem of justifying first principles really shows is that because reasons always run out or end up just going in circles, our starting point must always be something more like faith.

This is a great discussion. Read the rest here.

5. More On Tony Judt

Read the reflections of Judt's spouse, Jennifer Homans, on Judt's last days and his last work of intellectual history, titled Thinking the Twentieth Century. Keep some tissue nearby. Even so, here are some passages I found most intriguing (bolds mine):

The book is a history of twentieth-century thought. It begins with his reflections on Jewish idealism and Jewish suffering in Europe and ends with a devastating account of the failure of American politics in the post–cold war world. It is also an intellectual autobiography—of sorts. “Of sorts” because Tony rarely wrote in the first person, and the autobiographical sections of the book were wedged in, almost reluctantly, between the ideas, the history, the politics, and the ethical dilemmas that were central to his life.

This doesn’t mean that the book is not personal. For Tony, ideas were a kind of emotion, something he felt and cared about in the way that most people do about feelings like sadness or love. ...Ideas and the need for historical explanations ran deep, back then and right through to Thinking the Twentieth Century. [Judt family right, 4]

Of all of Tony’s writings, this book seems to me in need of some explanation: a backdrop or a scene, because the scene—the conditions under which it was written—was so dark and because the darkness shaped the book, in its form but also in its ideas. ...

So Thinking the Twentieth Century pours decades of thought and knowledge and days of illness into a lifelong idealism. It is an idealism that under the circumstances could be sustained only by a ferociously disciplined mind, and at great personal cost. I don’t mean that Tony believed in an ideal society. The only thing he was an idealist about was serious public debate. This was the one thing, along with love, that was always left standing no matter how much was felled by the disease, and so much was. Tony called it the core. To me it was a narrowing beam of light in the darkness that was separating Tony from us all. And if Thinking the Twentieth Century stands in the no-man’s-land between what is and what should be, as I think it does, this is in part because it was driven by the darkness but also part of the light. It was besieged, as he was.

The rest of Homans' piece is here.

The more I learn about Tony Judt, the more I want to read all of his work. - TL


---------------------------
Picture credits

1. Gretel Adorno, here.

2. Gretel and Theodor Adorno, here.

3. Colin McGinn, here.

4. Judt family, here.

Robert Nozick and the Libertarian Mind

If you had learned your U.S. intellectual history solely from this site over the past four years, you would have seen Robert Nozick's name explicitly mentioned only once in a post---as a secondary reference. His name has appeared indirectly, in a few books reviewed or mentioned here, such as Daniel Rodgers' Age of Fracture. That aside, Nozick has essentially been absent from USIH discussions until today. Why? I'm not sure. So let's begin at the beginning:

Who is Robert Nozick?

Born in New York City, he lived from 1938 to 2002. Nozick was a professor at Harvard University, where his fields of study were moral and political philosophy---in the analytic vein. His most famous work is Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) contains a nice summary of it.[1] Some have called Anarchy, State, and Utopia the libertarian response to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. After his most famous work, here is what the IEP article says about Nozick's professional trajectory:

Nozick neglected political philosophy for the rest of his philosophical career. He moved on to address other philosophical questions and made significant contributions to other areas of philosophical inquiry. In epistemology, Nozick developed an externalist analysis of knowledge in terms of counterfactual conditions that provides a response to radical skepticism. In metaphysics, he proposed a “closest continuer” theory of personal identity.

Nozick also delved into public philosophy, as you will see in the titles of a few of the following books by him:

- Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981)
- The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989)
- The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)
- Socratic Puzzles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)
- Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001)

Before diving too deeply into the contents of any one book, or Nozick's most significant ideas, let's look ahead a bit. What is Nozick's significance to later thinkers and scholars? A consideration of subsequent works about him may tell us something. With that, I've put together select list of significant books, theses, and dissertations that look at Nozick and his thought (located below, in order of oldest to most recent, gathered from here). A quick perusal of the list reveals that Nozick has received more attention over the last ten years.

On Nozick's significant ideas and influence, estimates like these are hazardous, but a quick study of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) reveals 106 references to, and citations of, his work. About 75-80 percent of those are related to Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Qualitatively speaking, Stephen Metcalf recently wrote the following, for Slate.com, about Nozick's historical significance (bolds mine):

--------------------------------------------------

As a moral philosopher, Nozick was free to stretch liberty further than even an Austrian economist. That is, he was able to separate out a normative claim (that liberty is the fundamental value of values, and should be maximized) from an empirical claim (that the most efficient method for allocating goods and services is a market economy). Free to pursue liberty as a matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand in his way. Should we tax the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not, as "taxation of earnings is on par with forced labor." (Or more precisely: "Taking the earnings of n hours of labor is like taking n hours from the person.") Well, isn't at least some redistribution necessary on the basis of need? "Need a gardener allocate his services to those lawns which need him most?"

To the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes at an unacceptable cost, namely, to my personal liberty. Most distressingly, to this end Nozick enlisted the humanist's most cherished belief: the inviolability of each human being as an end unto himself—what Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant, calls "the separateness of persons." For Nozick, the principle of the separateness of persons is close to sacred. It affirms, as he writes, "the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable."

I like to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian [read: cautious and gradualist] consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in '75, the same year Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts, culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops, nobody knows.

--------------------------------------------------

It should be noted that the point of Metcalf's polemical piece is to discuss why Nozick gave up libertarianism. The title reveals the article's thesis: "The Liberty Scam: Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism, gave up on the movement he inspired." [Aside: This article, by the way, is the best short take-down of extreme libertarianism I've ever read.]

That aside, the lines I excerpted from Metcalf's article seem to demand the following conclusion: Nozick is a major marker figure in the intellectual development of the New Right.

Before leaving Nozick for reader discussion, let me provide a final plug from historians on why Nozick matters. I don't have Daniel Rodgers' excellent book on hand (Age of Fracture), so I can't relay his passages on Nozick. But I do happen to have J. David Hoeveler, Jr.'s The Postmodernist Turn at my desk.[2] Hoeveler ends his book---in the last passages just before his Afterword---with a four-page reflection on Nozick. Here are few passages (bolds mine):

In the 1960s and early 1970s, libertarianism found outspoken defenders in Ayn Rand, science fiction novelist Robert Heinlein, and Murray Rothbard. ...When Rothbard happened to have a conversation with young Harvard professor, Robert Nozick, the professor decided to write a book.

Nozick took a circuitous route to libertarianism. In high school in the 1950s he had joined the youth branch of the Norman Thomas's Socialist Party, and as an undergraduate at Columbia he founded another Socialist group. But Nozick gradually yielded to the persuasive forces of individualism and of moral and economic systems that gave highest priority to the free individual. ...

Nozick's book [Anarchy] is not an easy matter. It flourishes with the philosopher's love of dense logic-chopping and finely-tuned disputation. The reader will find many pages full of mathematical symbols. In its analytical depth it resembles the work of Nozick's rival Rawls. ...One reviewer called [it] "a major event in political philosophy."...[noting] that recent political theory generally assumed the necessary distributive role of the state. However correct, he added, after Anarchy...these axioms could no longer be taken for granted. (pp. 168-69)

From here Hoeveler spends a great deal of time summarizing the book, discussing Nozick terms and axioms like "the entitlement theory," "end-result" or "end-state" principles, and Nozick's long (50-page) direct critique of Rawls. Here is Hoeveler's final statement on Nozick---which happens to also be the last page of the text (again, bolds mine):

Anarchy, State, and Utopia offered a theoretical, philosophical defense of libertarianism. ...It often gave illustrations, but too often came up short of details. Nonetheless, reviewers took Nozick's book to be, ultimately, a polemic against all the apparatus of the modern liberal state---welfare operations, public health care, compulsory social security, state-sponsored education, progressive taxation, and legislated equality of any kind. Some conservatives therefore welcomed Nozick's ideas. But Nozick wanted to be consistent. His libertarianism, however welcomed by conservative businessmen...aspired to give them no privileges. Nozick insisted that he opposed any government favoritism, as, for example, no subsidies to businesses (the airlines) or in protective tariffs. ...True and consistent libertarianism, like Nozick's, always confounds the liberal-conservative dichotomies. (p. 172).

With that, I ask the reader: How important does Nozick seem to be in the spectrum of conservative political (and social) philosophy? How significant was he to neoconservatives, or the New Right generally? If a "libertarian mind" exists (I don't necessarily believe ~one~ does), how has Nozick helped in its formation? How have you seen Nozick cited in USIH-type works beyond Rodgers and Hoeveler? - TL

--------------------------------------------------

[1] The IEP article is probably the most comprehensive of those I found online. It was written by Edward Feser of Pasadena City College. For what it's worth, Feser is a self-proclaimed political conservative and "traditional Roman Catholic" in matters of religion.

[2] The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s (New York: Twayne Publishers/Simon & Schuster Macillan, 1996).

--------------------------------------------------

Select, Significant Books, Dissertations, and Theses About Nozick

(Listed from oldest to most recent)


- Golash, Deirdre. "Entitlement and Equality: A Response to Robert Nozick." Thesis--University of Maryland, College Park, 1976.
- Goldsworthy, Jefferey Denys. "Robert Nozick and the Justifaction of Coercive Government." Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983, 1983.
- Luper, Steven. The Possibility of Knowledge: Nozick and His Critics. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987.
- Paul, Jeffrey, ed. Reading Nozick: Essays on Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.
- Wolff, Jonathan. Robert Nozick: Property, Justice, and the Minimal State. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1991.
- Roberts, P. M. "Historical Entitlement Theory: Robert Nozick and Hillet Steiner." Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wales Swansea, 1994, 1994.
- Jovic, Dejan. Robert Nozick: between Anarchy and State. Manchester: University of Manchester, 1995.
- Hailwood, Simon. Exploring Nozick: Beyond Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Sydney: Avebury, 1996.
- Lacey, A. R. Robert Nozick. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
- Casey, David T. "Negative Rights and Social Indifference: Trying to Resuscitate Robert Nozick's Libertarianism." Norton, MA: Wheaton College, 2001.
- Schmidtz, David, ed. Robert Nozick. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [right]
- Feser, Edward. On Nozick. Australia: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004.
- Payne-Johnson, Jesse Paul. "Anarchy, State, Utopia & the Social Contract: The Contractarian Foundations of Nozick's Libertarianism." Thesis (A.B., Honors in Government)--Harvard University, 2006, 2006.
- Bakaya, Santosh. The Political Theory of Robert Nozick. Delhi: Kalpaz, 2006.
- Schwab, Alexander B. "Rectifying Justice in Rectification: Dealing with Historical Injustice in Nozick's Minimal State." Thesis (A.B., Honors in Philosophy)--Harvard University, 2006, 2006.
- Murray, Dale F. Nozick, Autonomy, and Compensation. London: Continuum, 2007.
- Boaheng, Paul Biredu. "Nozick's Non-Libertarianism: A Philosophical Reconstruction." Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alberta, 2007, 2007.
- Bader, Ralf M. Robert Nozick. New York: Continuum, 2010.
- Papaioannou, Theo. Robert Nozick's Moral and Political Theory: A Philosophical Critique of Libertarianism. Lewiston, NY [u.a.]: Mellen Press, 2010.
- Bader, Ralf M., and John Meadowcroft. The Cambridge Companion to Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. [right]

Robert Nozick and the Libertarian Mind

If you had learned your U.S. intellectual history solely from this site over the past four years, you would have seen Robert Nozick's name explicitly mentioned only once in a post---as a secondary reference. His name has appeared indirectly, in a few books reviewed or mentioned here, such as Daniel Rodgers' Age of Fracture. That aside, Nozick has essentially been absent from USIH discussions until today. Why? I'm not sure. So let's begin at the beginning:

Who is Robert Nozick?

Born in New York City, he lived from 1938 to 2002. Nozick was a professor at Harvard University, where his fields of study were moral and political philosophy---in the analytic vein. His most famous work is Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) contains a nice summary of it.[1] Some have called Anarchy, State, and Utopia the libertarian response to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. After his most famous work, here is what the IEP article says about Nozick's professional trajectory:

Nozick neglected political philosophy for the rest of his philosophical career. He moved on to address other philosophical questions and made significant contributions to other areas of philosophical inquiry. In epistemology, Nozick developed an externalist analysis of knowledge in terms of counterfactual conditions that provides a response to radical skepticism. In metaphysics, he proposed a “closest continuer” theory of personal identity.

Nozick also delved into public philosophy, as you will see in the titles of a few of the following books by him:

- Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981)
- The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989)
- The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)
- Socratic Puzzles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)
- Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001)

Before diving too deeply into the contents of any one book, or Nozick's most significant ideas, let's look ahead a bit. What is Nozick's significance to later thinkers and scholars? A consideration of subsequent works about him may tell us something. With that, I've put together select list of significant books, theses, and dissertations that look at Nozick and his thought (located below, in order of oldest to most recent, gathered from here). A quick perusal of the list reveals that Nozick has received more attention over the last ten years.

On Nozick's significant ideas and influence, estimates like these are hazardous, but a quick study of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) reveals 106 references to, and citations of, his work. About 75-80 percent of those are related to Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Qualitatively speaking, Stephen Metcalf recently wrote the following, for Slate.com, about Nozick's historical significance (bolds mine):

--------------------------------------------------

As a moral philosopher, Nozick was free to stretch liberty further than even an Austrian economist. That is, he was able to separate out a normative claim (that liberty is the fundamental value of values, and should be maximized) from an empirical claim (that the most efficient method for allocating goods and services is a market economy). Free to pursue liberty as a matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand in his way. Should we tax the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not, as "taxation of earnings is on par with forced labor." (Or more precisely: "Taking the earnings of n hours of labor is like taking n hours from the person.") Well, isn't at least some redistribution necessary on the basis of need? "Need a gardener allocate his services to those lawns which need him most?"

To the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes at an unacceptable cost, namely, to my personal liberty. Most distressingly, to this end Nozick enlisted the humanist's most cherished belief: the inviolability of each human being as an end unto himself—what Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant, calls "the separateness of persons." For Nozick, the principle of the separateness of persons is close to sacred. It affirms, as he writes, "the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable."

I like to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian [read: cautious and gradualist] consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in '75, the same year Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts, culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops, nobody knows.

--------------------------------------------------

It should be noted that the point of Metcalf's polemical piece is to discuss why Nozick gave up libertarianism. The title reveals the article's thesis: "The Liberty Scam: Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism, gave up on the movement he inspired." [Aside: This article, by the way, is the best short take-down of extreme libertarianism I've ever read.]

That aside, the lines I excerpted from Metcalf's article seem to demand the following conclusion: Nozick is a major marker figure in the intellectual development of the New Right.

Before leaving Nozick for reader discussion, let me provide a final plug from historians on why Nozick matters. I don't have Daniel Rodgers' excellent book on hand (Age of Fracture), so I can't relay his passages on Nozick. But I do happen to have J. David Hoeveler, Jr.'s The Postmodernist Turn at my desk.[2] Hoeveler ends his book---in the last passages just before his Afterword---with a four-page reflection on Nozick. Here are few passages (bolds mine):

In the 1960s and early 1970s, libertarianism found outspoken defenders in Ayn Rand, science fiction novelist Robert Heinlein, and Murray Rothbard. ...When Rothbard happened to have a conversation with young Harvard professor, Robert Nozick, the professor decided to write a book.

Nozick took a circuitous route to libertarianism. In high school in the 1950s he had joined the youth branch of the Norman Thomas's Socialist Party, and as an undergraduate at Columbia he founded another Socialist group. But Nozick gradually yielded to the persuasive forces of individualism and of moral and economic systems that gave highest priority to the free individual. ...

Nozick's book [Anarchy] is not an easy matter. It flourishes with the philosopher's love of dense logic-chopping and finely-tuned disputation. The reader will find many pages full of mathematical symbols. In its analytical depth it resembles the work of Nozick's rival Rawls. ...One reviewer called [it] "a major event in political philosophy."...[noting] that recent political theory generally assumed the necessary distributive role of the state. However correct, he added, after Anarchy...these axioms could no longer be taken for granted. (pp. 168-69)

From here Hoeveler spends a great deal of time summarizing the book, discussing Nozick terms and axioms like "the entitlement theory," "end-result" or "end-state" principles, and Nozick's long (50-page) direct critique of Rawls. Here is Hoeveler's final statement on Nozick---which happens to also be the last page of the text (again, bolds mine):

Anarchy, State, and Utopia offered a theoretical, philosophical defense of libertarianism. ...It often gave illustrations, but too often came up short of details. Nonetheless, reviewers took Nozick's book to be, ultimately, a polemic against all the apparatus of the modern liberal state---welfare operations, public health care, compulsory social security, state-sponsored education, progressive taxation, and legislated equality of any kind. Some conservatives therefore welcomed Nozick's ideas. But Nozick wanted to be consistent. His libertarianism, however welcomed by conservative businessmen...aspired to give them no privileges. Nozick insisted that he opposed any government favoritism, as, for example, no subsidies to businesses (the airlines) or in protective tariffs. ...True and consistent libertarianism, like Nozick's, always confounds the liberal-conservative dichotomies. (p. 172).

With that, I ask the reader: How important does Nozick seem to be in the spectrum of conservative political (and social) philosophy? How significant was he to neoconservatives, or the New Right generally? If a "libertarian mind" exists (I don't necessarily believe ~one~ does), how has Nozick helped in its formation? How have you seen Nozick cited in USIH-type works beyond Rodgers and Hoeveler? - TL

--------------------------------------------------

[1] The IEP article is probably the most comprehensive of those I found online. It was written by Edward Feser of Pasadena City College. For what it's worth, Feser is a self-proclaimed political conservative and "traditional Roman Catholic" in matters of religion.

[2] The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s (New York: Twayne Publishers/Simon & Schuster Macillan, 1996).

--------------------------------------------------

Select, Significant Books, Dissertations, and Theses About Nozick

(Listed from oldest to most recent)


- Golash, Deirdre. "Entitlement and Equality: A Response to Robert Nozick." Thesis--University of Maryland, College Park, 1976.
- Goldsworthy, Jefferey Denys. "Robert Nozick and the Justifaction of Coercive Government." Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983, 1983.
- Luper, Steven. The Possibility of Knowledge: Nozick and His Critics. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987.
- Paul, Jeffrey, ed. Reading Nozick: Essays on Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.
- Wolff, Jonathan. Robert Nozick: Property, Justice, and the Minimal State. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1991.
- Roberts, P. M. "Historical Entitlement Theory: Robert Nozick and Hillet Steiner." Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wales Swansea, 1994, 1994.
- Jovic, Dejan. Robert Nozick: between Anarchy and State. Manchester: University of Manchester, 1995.
- Hailwood, Simon. Exploring Nozick: Beyond Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Sydney: Avebury, 1996.
- Lacey, A. R. Robert Nozick. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
- Casey, David T. "Negative Rights and Social Indifference: Trying to Resuscitate Robert Nozick's Libertarianism." Norton, MA: Wheaton College, 2001.
- Schmidtz, David, ed. Robert Nozick. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [right]
- Feser, Edward. On Nozick. Australia: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004.
- Payne-Johnson, Jesse Paul. "Anarchy, State, Utopia & the Social Contract: The Contractarian Foundations of Nozick's Libertarianism." Thesis (A.B., Honors in Government)--Harvard University, 2006, 2006.
- Bakaya, Santosh. The Political Theory of Robert Nozick. Delhi: Kalpaz, 2006.
- Schwab, Alexander B. "Rectifying Justice in Rectification: Dealing with Historical Injustice in Nozick's Minimal State." Thesis (A.B., Honors in Philosophy)--Harvard University, 2006, 2006.
- Murray, Dale F. Nozick, Autonomy, and Compensation. London: Continuum, 2007.
- Boaheng, Paul Biredu. "Nozick's Non-Libertarianism: A Philosophical Reconstruction." Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alberta, 2007, 2007.
- Bader, Ralf M. Robert Nozick. New York: Continuum, 2010.
- Papaioannou, Theo. Robert Nozick's Moral and Political Theory: A Philosophical Critique of Libertarianism. Lewiston, NY [u.a.]: Mellen Press, 2010.
- Bader, Ralf M., and John Meadowcroft. The Cambridge Companion to Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. [right]

CFP Of Interest: Essays in Philosophy

This upcoming issue of Essays in Philosophy looks like it's begging for a contribution from an intellectual historian. I mean, the best predictor of the future is past performance, right? That's what the investment adds tell us. Anyway, I've put passages of interest in bold. - TL

---------------------------------------------------------

Call for papers: Special issue of Essays in Philosophy

Philosophy's Future: Science or Something Else?

It has been well over two centuries since Kant asked, essentially, whether philosophy is possible as a science. What is the answer? Analytic philosophers today talk as if our discipline is a branch of science: We aspire to the rigor of mathematics, the objectivity of physics, the explanatory power of biology, and so forth. But if philosophy is like a science, then it is a science like no other. Philosophical proposals that are hundreds or even thousands of years old are taken seriously in the present, even as it is widely believed that those ideas don't solve their respective problems. No philosophical idea ever dies, and no philosophical idea ever gains full acceptance, either. No other solution-based, intellectual discipline has this property. Philosophers hypothesize answers like scientists, structure arguments like mathematicians, and end up with theories as inscrutable as art. It is time to ask again where philosophy stands as a problem solving discipline-to ask again, have we advanced even one step? Can we?

Essays in Philosophy, Volume 12, Number 2
Issue date: July 2011
Submission deadline: December 31, 2010
Editors: Eric Dietrich (SUNY Binghamton) and Zach Weber (University of
Melbourne)

All submissions should be sent to the general editor via email:
boersema@pacificu.edu.

CFP Of Interest: Essays in Philosophy

This upcoming issue of Essays in Philosophy looks like it's begging for a contribution from an intellectual historian. I mean, the best predictor of the future is past performance, right? That's what the investment adds tell us. Anyway, I've put passages of interest in bold. - TL

---------------------------------------------------------

Call for papers: Special issue of Essays in Philosophy

Philosophy's Future: Science or Something Else?

It has been well over two centuries since Kant asked, essentially, whether philosophy is possible as a science. What is the answer? Analytic philosophers today talk as if our discipline is a branch of science: We aspire to the rigor of mathematics, the objectivity of physics, the explanatory power of biology, and so forth. But if philosophy is like a science, then it is a science like no other. Philosophical proposals that are hundreds or even thousands of years old are taken seriously in the present, even as it is widely believed that those ideas don't solve their respective problems. No philosophical idea ever dies, and no philosophical idea ever gains full acceptance, either. No other solution-based, intellectual discipline has this property. Philosophers hypothesize answers like scientists, structure arguments like mathematicians, and end up with theories as inscrutable as art. It is time to ask again where philosophy stands as a problem solving discipline-to ask again, have we advanced even one step? Can we?

Essays in Philosophy, Volume 12, Number 2
Issue date: July 2011
Submission deadline: December 31, 2010
Editors: Eric Dietrich (SUNY Binghamton) and Zach Weber (University of
Melbourne)

All submissions should be sent to the general editor via email:
boersema@pacificu.edu.

Tim's Light Reading (12/17/2009)

1. What Today's Philosophers Think: Although I understand some of the questions given here by The PhilPapers Surveys, another subset are beyond me---at least as of today. The authors of the quiz concede that they framed many of the questions within the analytic tradition, and my strengths (the few I possess) do not lie in the history of that era, or in its terminology, so my ignorance should not have surprised me. Still, I'm intrigued by what I do know of the issues. The demographics portion of the survey included a question (at the bottom) about the non-living philosophers with which today's group identified. Notice Foucault garnered only 11 votes, and Adorno only 6. I was shocked to see Hume at the top, as well as Aristotle---one of my favorites---still holding at #2. My other favorite is Aquinas, who came in at #24 with 69 votes. Dewey, Sellars, and Peirce came in at 29, 30, and 31 with 31, 30, and 28 votes, respectively. James entered at 34 with 22 votes. Based on my more recent, less historical observations of Catholic thought and the analytical framework of the questions, I'm somewhat surprised to see neither this guy nor this movement on the lists. I figured one or the other would get the 5 minimum nods to be counted.

2. Livingston At HNN: Here's a partial reprise of James Livingston's USIH address, which is also an excerpt from his new book, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century. And here's his new blog address. There he takes on the criticisms of Eric Alterman given during the conference, and reveals---at the end of the post---that he told a (white) lie to Alterman and the rest of us during Q&A.

3. Culture Wars at "The Great Books College of Chicago": As an observer and student of trends in the history of the great books idea, I can't resist bringing to your attention a story out of Chicago. The gist is this: Some faculty and and students at Shimer College are worried that the administration, headed by President Thomas K. Lindsay, is engineering a conservative take over of the institution. A bit of background is necessary. Shimer began as a small liberal arts college in Illinois, originally located in Mount Carroll, that took on a great books curriculum in the 1950s. That curriculum derived from the thinking of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former University of Chicago president, and probably Mortimer J. Adler, Hutchins's friend and intellectual advisor. The college's great books list originally looked a lot like the one comprising Britannica's 1952 Great Books set, but evolved to something more liberal and inclusive as time passed. With regard to its staff, faculty, and students, Shimer became known, especially in the 1970s, for its liberal social and cultural atmosphere. This was evident not just in behavior (which hearsay has probably amplified) during the "Me Decade," but also---and more importantly---in Shimer's radically democratic shared governance scheme, the "Assembly," discussed in the first link above. While some comments to the article express dismay at the culture wars overlay in the piece, saying this is an administrative issue only, there does appear to be a right-ward trend in relation to new Board of Trustees members. This weblog is documenting student, faculty, and staff resistance to the changes. There's a lot to say about this story, but my biggest surprise is that this political-social tug-of-war is only just now hitting Shimer. I'm shocked it didn't happen in the 1980s or 1990s, well before its move to Chicago.

4. The Great Books College of C.S. Lewis: Thanks to John Fea, I have learned that a C.S. Lewis-inspired, ecumenically Christian college is opening in Northfield, MA. The curriculum is, of course, to be based on the great books idea. John didn't say which version of the great books idea they'd be utilizing, but I can imagine a Britannica connection. I'd have to explore their website to learn more. I'll wait on that project, however, until they actually open and host a first class.

5. So you read the Encyclopedia Britannica?: Continuing the great books/Britannica subtheme of today's entries, A.J. Jacobs reflects on the proportion of things-remembered to things-learned after having read the Encyclopedia Britannica near the beginning of this decade. He recorded much of that endeavor in his 2004 book, The Know-It-All. Two parts from the Youtube clip caught my attention. Jacobs emphatically declares that he's forgotten "a huge amount" right off the bat-- about 97-98 percent he thinks. But he also reflects, around the 55 second mark, on the fact that he's gained a deeper, more useful-than-trivia kind of knowledge from that reading. For instance, he cited a justified, affirming optimism about humanity's ability to adapt and grow (my words) that has resulted from his survey of the accomplishments of human civilization.

6. Midsouth Philosophy Conference: I bring this to your attention because of the openness of the call---meaning historians of the Lovejovian variety might be welcome: "The thirty-fourth annual Midsouth Philosophy Conference is scheduled for Friday afternoon and Saturday, March 5-6, at The University of Memphis. Papers in any area are welcome. There will be a $25 registration fee, payable by cash or check at the conference (but not by credit or debit card). Alastair Norcross (University of Colorado at Boulder) will deliver the keynote address."

Tim's Light Reading (12/17/2009)

1. What Today's Philosophers Think: Although I understand some of the questions given here by The PhilPapers Surveys, another subset are beyond me---at least as of today. The authors of the quiz concede that they framed many of the questions within the analytic tradition, and my strengths (the few I possess) do not lie in the history of that era, or in its terminology, so my ignorance should not have surprised me. Still, I'm intrigued by what I do know of the issues. The demographics portion of the survey included a question (at the bottom) about the non-living philosophers with which today's group identified. Notice Foucault garnered only 11 votes, and Adorno only 6. I was shocked to see Hume at the top, as well as Aristotle---one of my favorites---still holding at #2. My other favorite is Aquinas, who came in at #24 with 69 votes. Dewey, Sellars, and Peirce came in at 29, 30, and 31 with 31, 30, and 28 votes, respectively. James entered at 34 with 22 votes. Based on my more recent, less historical observations of Catholic thought and the analytical framework of the questions, I'm somewhat surprised to see neither this guy nor this movement on the lists. I figured one or the other would get the 5 minimum nods to be counted.

2. Livingston At HNN: Here's a partial reprise of James Livingston's USIH address, which is also an excerpt from his new book, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century. And here's his new blog address. There he takes on the criticisms of Eric Alterman given during the conference, and reveals---at the end of the post---that he told a (white) lie to Alterman and the rest of us during Q&A.

3. Culture Wars at "The Great Books College of Chicago": As an observer and student of trends in the history of the great books idea, I can't resist bringing to your attention a story out of Chicago. The gist is this: Some faculty and and students at Shimer College are worried that the administration, headed by President Thomas K. Lindsay, is engineering a conservative take over of the institution. A bit of background is necessary. Shimer began as a small liberal arts college in Illinois, originally located in Mount Carroll, that took on a great books curriculum in the 1950s. That curriculum derived from the thinking of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former University of Chicago president, and probably Mortimer J. Adler, Hutchins's friend and intellectual advisor. The college's great books list originally looked a lot like the one comprising Britannica's 1952 Great Books set, but evolved to something more liberal and inclusive as time passed. With regard to its staff, faculty, and students, Shimer became known, especially in the 1970s, for its liberal social and cultural atmosphere. This was evident not just in behavior (which hearsay has probably amplified) during the "Me Decade," but also---and more importantly---in Shimer's radically democratic shared governance scheme, the "Assembly," discussed in the first link above. While some comments to the article express dismay at the culture wars overlay in the piece, saying this is an administrative issue only, there does appear to be a right-ward trend in relation to new Board of Trustees members. This weblog is documenting student, faculty, and staff resistance to the changes. There's a lot to say about this story, but my biggest surprise is that this political-social tug-of-war is only just now hitting Shimer. I'm shocked it didn't happen in the 1980s or 1990s, well before its move to Chicago.

4. The Great Books College of C.S. Lewis: Thanks to John Fea, I have learned that a C.S. Lewis-inspired, ecumenically Christian college is opening in Northfield, MA. The curriculum is, of course, to be based on the great books idea. John didn't say which version of the great books idea they'd be utilizing, but I can imagine a Britannica connection. I'd have to explore their website to learn more. I'll wait on that project, however, until they actually open and host a first class.

5. So you read the Encyclopedia Britannica?: Continuing the great books/Britannica subtheme of today's entries, A.J. Jacobs reflects on the proportion of things-remembered to things-learned after having read the Encyclopedia Britannica near the beginning of this decade. He recorded much of that endeavor in his 2004 book, The Know-It-All. Two parts from the Youtube clip caught my attention. Jacobs emphatically declares that he's forgotten "a huge amount" right off the bat-- about 97-98 percent he thinks. But he also reflects, around the 55 second mark, on the fact that he's gained a deeper, more useful-than-trivia kind of knowledge from that reading. For instance, he cited a justified, affirming optimism about humanity's ability to adapt and grow (my words) that has resulted from his survey of the accomplishments of human civilization.

6. Midsouth Philosophy Conference: I bring this to your attention because of the openness of the call---meaning historians of the Lovejovian variety might be welcome: "The thirty-fourth annual Midsouth Philosophy Conference is scheduled for Friday afternoon and Saturday, March 5-6, at The University of Memphis. Papers in any area are welcome. There will be a $25 registration fee, payable by cash or check at the conference (but not by credit or debit card). Alastair Norcross (University of Colorado at Boulder) will deliver the keynote address."