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. 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". Hacking believed that, like the philosopher Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Philosophical Explanations had the potential to bring renewed public attention to philosophy in the United States. He believed that the book would also impress philosophy professors. He compared the difficulty of reading it to that of reading the Critique of Pure Reason, writing that in both works there was "apparent indifference to the reader"; he also considered Nozick's philosophical approach in some ways similar to Kant's. Gordon described the book as "amazingly original", and praised the "extraordinary elegance" of Nozick's arguments, as well as his "vigorous and enthusiastic style." Lilla wrote that the book showed the same "intellectual virtues" as Nozick's previous work Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), and that it "testifies to the voraciousness of his intellectual appetite." He praised Nozick's chapter on ethics as "probably the most accomplished in the book", and suggested that together with Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Nozick may have helped achieve "a revival in American academic philosophy." He credited Rorty and Nozick with confronting philosophy's crisis with "careful reason, wit, and a humane concern for the fundamental questions", thereby showing that academic philosophy is still worth studying. He described both their works as "major books" that directly address the "doubt in which academic philosophy finds itself" due to charges that it is overly technical and ignores or misunderstands continental philosophy. Barker compared the book to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), and described it as "powerful", brilliant, and well-written. He welcomed what he saw as Nozick's call for a "calmer and more tolerant tone in philosophical discussions" and praised Nozick's discussions of "the self" and of the metaphysical question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?". However, he maintained that some of the explanations Nozick advanced of various subjects explained them only to a limited degree.
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