Product Description

Contemporary scientific advances have placed many traditional philosophical concepts under great stress. In this book, the philosopher Robert Nozick rethinks and transforms the concepts of truth, objectivity, necessity, contingency, consciousness, and ethics. Using an original method, he presents philosophical theories that take account of scientific advances in physics, evolutionary biology, economics, and cognitive neuroscience, and casts current cultural controversies (such as whether all truth is relative and whether ethics is objective) in a wholly new light. Throughout, the book is open to, and engages in, the exploration of alternative philosophical possibilities. Truth is embedded in space-time and is relative to it. However, truth is not socially relative among human beings (extraterrestrials are another matter). Objective facts are invariant under specified transformations; objective beliefs are arrived at by a process in which biasing factors do not play a significant role. Necessity's domain is contracted (there are no important metaphysical necessities; water is not necessarily H2O) while the important and useful notion of degrees of contingency is elaborated. Gradations of consciousness (based upon "common registering") yield increasing capacity to fit actions to the world. The originating function of ethics is cooperation to mutual benefit, and evolution has instilled within humans a "normative module": the capacities to learn, internalize, follow norms, and make evaluations. Ethics has normative force because of the connection between ethics and conscious self-awareness. Nozick brings together the book's novel theories to show the extent to which there are objective ethical truths.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #781983 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

Review
It is a philosophical book in the truest sense of the word...[Robert Nozick] capitalizes on his impressive knowledge of twentieth-century developments in epistemology, in methodology and philosophy of science, and in science itself. And he confronts the uncertainties those developments have led us into head on without in the least being sentimental about it. This is not a book about chess, this is chess itself, drawing on the immense reservoir of games played and documented during the last hundred years...This book and each paragraph in it is the strongest antidote to the current spread of slides-thinking I have been confronted with in years. Which does not imply that I have gained much knowledge or wisdom by reading it. That is because even the illustrations and factual evidence presuppose too intimate an acquaintance with the scientific context and because it is not offering wisdom -- it is offering an exercise in working with wisdom, which is something else entirely. Philosophy begins in wonder, according to Aristotle. -- Jos Leys "Ethical Perspectives"

About the Author
Robert Nozick is Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. His book Anarchy, State, and Utopia received a National Book Award.

Customer Reviews

Nozick at his best
Robert Nozick was both the most innovative and imaginative of 20th Century philosophers and his early death is a huge loss. What was remarkable about Nozick was his breadth and the ambition of his thought. Moreover, he usually succeeded in making a serious contribution the areas he turned his mind to.

This best part of this book is that it offers a significant contribution to the debate on relativism and absolutism. Indeed social constructionists will have serious difficulty in rebutting Nozick's arguments.

Parts of this book are difficult, particularly for those without a scientific background. However, making the effort pays off with some wonderful insights on relativism, the nature of objective knowledge and the place of ethics.