※ [本文轉錄自 CollegeForum 看板] 作者: requiem (savoir faire) 看板: CollegeForum 標題: 連 Nozick 也死了？ 時間: Sun Jan 27 03:21:54 2002 自由日似乎不是什麼好日子。 僅僅在自由日後一天，一時引領風騷的右派 Robert Nozick 也死了，得年 63。 以下是來自紐約時報的消息： http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/24/obituaries/24NOZI.html Robert Nozick, Harvard Political Philosopher, Dies at 63 By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT Robert Nozick, the intellectually nimble Harvard philosopher whose critique of America's social welfare system 25 years ago continues to define the debate between conservatives and liberals, died yesterday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 63. He died of complications from stomach cancer, the university said. In his first book, "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" (Basic Books, 1974), Professor Nozick starkly and vigorously attacked the forms of paternalistic government that "forbid capitalistic acts between consenting adults." Writing in a chatty style that was praised for its accessibility to a wide readership ?his work won a National Book Award ?Professor Nozick took off after the liberal orthodoxy that had created and nourished the modern welfare state. The state, he wrote, is fine, as long as it is minimal, as long as it does not coerce the individual or usurp his rights, something he argued that American government did on unexamined assumptions. He began by defending the "night watchman" state of classical 19th century theory, or the state in which government does no more than protect its members from violence, theft and breach of contract. He undertook to do this by showing how such a state could be "evolved," as he put it, from a theoretical state of nature without anyone's natural rights being violated. He argued that no more than the minimal state could be justified, asserting that no one who has legitimately acquired what he termed "holdings" can be under any enforced obligation to give them away. In this he was providing a pointed conservative response to a liberal colleague at Harvard, John Rawls, the author of "A Theory of Justice," and like-minded advocates of so- called redistributive justice, the obligation of a state to improve the lot of its less advantaged by taking from the advantaged. Mr. Nozick asserted that Mr. Rawls's quest for equality involved the imposition of inequality. The implications of "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" are strongly libertarian and proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification. But even liberal philosophers found Mr. Nozick's logic compelling. Peter Singer, the Australian social philosopher and bioethicist, wrote in The New York Review of Books that the book "is a major event in contemporary political philosophy." Henceforth, he said, assumptions like the right of the state to bring about redistribution through such "coercive means" as progressive taxation "will need to be defended and argued for instead of being taken for granted." The book was filled with playful ramifications and diverting detours, like Professor Nozick's modest proposal for redistributing sex appeal by means of plastic surgery. Robert Nozick was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 16, 1938, the son of Max Nozick, an immigrant from Russia who ran a small business, and Sophie Cohen Nozick. He attended public school in Brooklyn, where he started out on the left by joining the youth branch of Norman Thomas's Socialist Party, and came to philosophy through a paperback copy of Plato's "Republic," which, as he wrote in a later book, "The Examined Life" (1989), he read only some of and understood less. "But I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful," Professor Nozick wrote. He went on to Columbia College, where he founded the local chapter of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which in 1962 changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society. He received a bachelor of arts degree in 1959, and that year married Barbara Fierer. They had two children, Emily and David. The Nozicks later divorced, and Professor Nozick married the poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. She survives him, as do his children. Mr. Nozick entered graduate school at Princeton University, where he earned an M.A. in 1961 and a Ph.D. in 1963, while serving as an instructor in philosophy. It was at Princeton that he first encountered arguments in defense of capitalism. "At first, I thought: `No, those arguments aren't good ones,"' he told an interviewer from Forbes Magazine in 1975. "The more I explored the arguments, the more convincing they looked. For a while I thought: `Well, yes, the arguments are right, capitalism is the best system, but only bad people would think so.' Then, at some point, my mind and heart were in unison." Throughout his career, his interests as a teacher ranged widely. Over the years, he taught courses jointly with members of the government, psychology and economics departments, and at the divinity and law schools. In the spring of 1997, Professor Nozick delivered the six John Locke Lectures at Oxford University. He held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Professor Nozick was chairman of the Harvard philosophy department from 1981 to 1984, and in 1998 he was named University Professor, Harvard's most distinguished professorial position. Only 17 others held the title at the time. Despite the reputation as a right- wing philosopher that "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" left him with, Professor Nozick was as intellectually diverse in his writing as he was in his teaching. In "Philosophical Explanations" (1981), he explored the nature of knowledge, the self, free will and ethics. (The book won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa.) "The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations" (1989) contained 27 essays on subjects like love, happiness and creativity, as well as evil and the Holocaust. In some of his works, Professor Nozick seemed to pull back from the extreme positions of "Anarchy, State, and Utopia." If his positions zigzagged, he appeared to see this as a necessary pattern, even in on the scale of national politics. "The electorate wants the zigzag," he wrote. "Sensible folk, they realize that no political position will adequately include all of the values and goals one wants pursued in the political realm, so these will have to take turns. The electorate as a whole behaves in this sensible fashion, even if significant numbers of people stay committed to their previous goals and favorite programs, come what may." But it is his first book that seems to have the staying power. Still in print, it has been translated into 11 languages and even stood as a prop in an episode of the television series "The Sopranos." In a caustic reference to the state's power to protect, a witness to a murder is shown reading the book just as he learns from his wife that the mob boss Tony Soprano is the suspect. Terrified, he decides not to testify after all. --

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