Test Your Knowledge of Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick: American Political Philosopher

• Robert Nozick was an American philosopher known for his work in political philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics.
• He was born in Brooklyn to a Jewish family and attended Columbia College, Princeton University, and Oxford University.
• Nozick's most famous work, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, argues that only a minimal state is justified, limited to the functions of protection against "force, fraud, theft, and administering courts of law."
• He challenged John Rawls's theory of justice and argued that a distribution of goods is just if brought about by free exchange among consenting adults, even if large inequalities subsequently emerge from the process.
• Nozick's epistemological system attempted to deal with the Gettier problem and skepticism and argued that justification is not a necessary requirement for knowledge.
• His final work, Invariances, introduced his theory of evolutionary cosmology, arguing that objectivity arises through being invariant under various transformations.
• Nozick received a National Book Award for Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974, and Philosophical Explanations received the Phi Beta Kappa Society's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award.
• In The Examined Life, Nozick expressed misgivings about capitalist libertarianism and suggested that wealth is sometimes justly redistributed via taxation to protect the freedom of the many.
• Nozick's philosophical method was exploratory and ecumenical, drawing on literature outside of philosophy, such as economics, physics, and evolutionary biology.