Philosophical Explanations is a 1981 metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical treatise by the 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).
Observing that philosophers often seek to deduce their total view from a few basic principles, showing how everything follows from their intuitively based axioms, Nozick compares such an approach to building a tower by piling one brick on top of another: if the brick at the bottom crumbles or is removed, everything collapses, and even the insights that were independent of the starting point are lost. He suggests instead that the Parthenon should be the model for philosophy, and advocates an explanatory model of philosophical activity rather than an argumentative or coercive one. In the Parthenon model, separate philosophical insights are placed one after another, like columns, and only afterwards are they united under a roof consisting of general principles or themes. That way, when the philosophical ground crumbles, something Nozick regards as likely, something of interest and beauty remains standing.
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.
MacIntyre considered the book an important, well-written, and rewarding discussion of the central problems of philosophy, writing that it "communicates its author's own excitement about both the problems and his solutions". MacIntyre credited Nozick with showing "striking and imaginative originality" by proposing that philosophy should replace the ideal of proof with "the notion of explanation", vindicating the importance of technical discussions in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind with "the uses he finds for their conceptual end products", and indirectly showing "how Continental philosophers who have been explicitly concerned with human value and significance have too often presented us with impoverished and barren discussions on these great issues because they have neglected the more technical discussions of Anglo-American analytic philosophy." He also praised Nozick's discussions of the identity of the self, knowledge, free will, and skepticism, writing that they provide "splendid insights and arguments".