Robert Nozick

About the author

Robert Nozick (1938–2002) was an American philosopher who held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University and served as president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a landmark libertarian rejoinder to John Rawls, in which he argues that only a minimal state can be justified. His Philosophical Explanations (1981), winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, advanced a counterfactual theory of knowledge.

His final work, Invariances (2001), proposed an evolutionary cosmology in which objectivity itself emerges across possible worlds.