Philosophical Explanations.

NOZICK’S MOST THOROUGHLY PHILOSOPHICAL WORK, INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR

First edition. Large 8vo. xii, [2], 764 pp. Original black cloth, spine lettered in silver, dust jacket (faint spotting to top edge, light wear to extremities of jacket, closed tear to foot of rear joint with some creasing to bottom edge of rear panel, otherwise a very good copy). Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press.

Inscribed by the author to the American philosopher Roderick Firth (1917-1987), a colleague of Nozick's at Harvard, "For Rod, Fondly Bob August, 1981" in blue ink to the front free endpaper.

Philosophical Explanations, Nozick's second book, marked a fundamental epistemological shift in his whole approach to philosophy, moving away from the usual semi-coercive philosophical goals of proof, of forcing people to accept conclusions, as in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Instead, the book contains a thorough examination of the notion of explanation and understanding in philosophical reasoning.

"It was this emphasis on explanation that linked this development to his teacher Carl Gustav Hempel, whose most important contribution to philosophy of science consisted in a thorough examination of the notion of explanation, although with Nozick the notion led in a quite different direction from the analytic interests of Hempel. What Nozick objects to is the alleged coercive nature of philosophy in the analytical and similar traditions. He is against the whole enterprise of proof as an aim of philosophy because he think of it as trying to force people to believe things" (Lacey, Robert Nozick, p. 6-7).

Stock Code: 245359