Customer Reviews

Socratic Puzzles

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Nozick's important papers are all here, from the ones that made his reputation thirty years ago to some insightful pieces from the mid '90s. The range is broad, as anyone who's read much of his work would expect; long-time Nozick readers will also recognize the unfortunately flip note in a few papers. On balance, though, there's a lot worth reading in this book, most of it thought-provoking.

Nozick made his reputation in the '60s with some really spectacular papers in decision theory. Those papers (Coercion; Newcomb's Problem and Two Principles of Choice, and Moral Complications and Moral Structures) are all here, which is helpful since the originals can be hard to dig up--I needed the Newcomb paper for my senior thesis way back when and had to wait like a month before the library located it.

These papers are dense, but deeply rewarding. Newcomb's Problem, which introduced this puzzle, is a good introduction to the field, technically rigorous but readable, though I don't really agree with his answer. Coercion has some stuff about rights that prefigures the claims in Anarchy, State and Utopia. Moral Complications is an amazing paper, really rich but still intelligible. I don't buy everything he says, and I think Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel have both come closer to describing how moral thought really works, but anyone interested in moral philosophy should study this paper.

The pieces on Socrates, Quine and the theory of explanation focus on various areas of philosophical method and choice of subject matter. Most of his suggestions here seem right or at least plausible, though he says an awful lot about reductionism without actually saying whether he believes in it or not.

The short pieces on various issues in value theory are mostly insightful, though a few are just clever. The doggerel on universal gravitation seems to show that Goodman's notion of aesthetic merit in insufficient, not flat-out wrong; his claim the the percentage of Israelis living on kibbutzim is a serious measure of how many people would choose socialism seems a stretch. The Characteristic Features of Extremism is sharp but disapointingly short. The review of Regan's Case for Animal Rights raises a serious challenge to hard-line animal rights ethics and proposes a solution to the problem of animals' ethical standing, though I'm not completely happy with his suggestion.

The final selection of short stories on philosophical themes includes twin gems, Testament and Teleology, which would be great on an introductory philosophy syllabus but don't really offer new insight. Oddly, his most famous story, "G-d", isn't here, probably because the published version was edited in a way he didn't like. It's too bad--that story has more bite than the ones here. The stories are all cute, though they're more clever than deep.