BOOKS
THINK TANK
PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLANATIONS.
By
Robert Nozick.
The Belknap
Press/Harvard University Press. $25.00.
This extraordinary book tells us what happened when one
academic philospher, of the analytic school, abandoned caution and
decided to present in a large book his thoughts on most of the grand,
exciting problems of philosophy. Who does not long for such an
enterprise to succeed? And why, one thinks, should it not succeed in
the hands of Robert Nozick, who is very clever, very energetic, and
extremely erudite, and who moreover asks unusual and intriguing
questions such as "Why is there something rather than nothing?" as
well as addressing himself boldly to familiar topics such as the iden–
tity of a person, freedom of the will, knowledge and skepticism, the
objectivity of values, and the meaning of life? The result is, however,
a book of very uneven quality. In parts it is excellent, and Nozick's
suggestions are likely to become part of the present philosophical
scene; in other parts, as in the section on ethics, he seems to weave
together not wholly comprehensible abstractions, in language that
lacks the admirable and important plainness of Anglo-American
philosophy at its best.
Nozick wanted, above all, to explain how it is possible that we
have free will. It is, as he says, of great importance to us not to see
ourselves as the mere playthings of external forces . And this is what
we appear to be if determinism is true. Yet indeterminism seems no
better if it is taken to imply that we do not originate our actions,
which rather arise by chance. Nozick tries to show how there might
be room for free will if determinism is true, and again if it is false,
but he is not sure that he has succeeded. Others may doubt this, too,
but will find that Nozick's discussion is laced with observations that
are pertinent and fresh. He points out, for instance, that the free–
dom in which we are interested is not freedom of choice between just
any alternatives, as if it would be enough that a murderer could
choose between shooting and stabbing. We want to have acts of dif–
ferent values among our genuine alternatives .
It
was in the hope of making progress on the subject of free will
that Nozick undertook the analysis of knowledge that forms the basis
of the most successful section of
Philosophical Explanations.
The side
