Philosophical Explanations
1981 non-fiction work by Robert Nozick
Philosophical Explanations is a 1981 treatise on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics by philosopher Robert Nozick.
The book received positive reviews. Commentators have compared Philosophical Explanations to the philosopher Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and praised it for Nozick's discussions of the fundamental questions of philosophy and of topics such as epistemology and ethics, and welcomed it as a convincing response to charges that American academic philosophy is overly concerned with technical issues. Nozick's discussions of knowledge and skepticism have received much critical attention.
Summary
Nozick discuses branches of philosophy such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, specific philosophical problems concerning issues such as free will, skepticism, the mind–body problem and the problem of other minds, the nature of personal identity, and the meaning of life, and the work of individual philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant. He discusses Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
Publication history
Philosophical Explanations was first published in 1981 by Harvard University Press. By 1994, it was in its eleventh printing.
Reception
Reviews
Philosophical Explanations received positive reviews from the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in The New York Times Book Review, the philosopher Ian Hacking in The New Republic, the philosopher David Gordon in Library Journal, the political scientist Mark Lilla in The American Scholar, and the philosopher Stephen F. Barker in Harvard Educational Review. The book was also reviewed by the philosopher Robert Cummings Neville in Modern Age, the philosopher Robert Fogelin in The Journal of Philosophy, Russell Hardin in Ethics, Leslie Stevenson in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, George Weckman in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Anthony Ellis in Mind, Jeffrey Stout in The Journal of Religion, and by The Economist.
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