Volume 49, Number 11 · June 27, 2002
An Ardent Fallibilist
By Colin McGinn
Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World
by Robert Nozick
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 416 pp., $35.00
The following review was written before news of Robert Nozick's death in January. He was Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, and was named a University Professor there in 1998, Harvard's most distinguished professorial position. Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published in 1974, when Nozick was only thirty-five, was his most publicly visible book, but he wrote several others—most notably, I think, Philosophical Explanations (1981). A recent collection, Robert Nozick, edited by David Schmidtz (Cambridge University Press, 2002), contains essays by ten distinguished philosophers on aspects of Nozick's philosophy. I never met him, but always admired his prodigious energy and undeniable brilliance. My review is, I hope, written in a spirit of open and honest criticism of which I think he would have approved. I had fully expected a strong reply from him in the correspondence columns of this journal, but that is not to be.
Review, 4335 words
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