Remora

Limited Inc admits that we were once forced, in a philosophy class, to peruse Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick's masterpiece. We did not come away from the experience with the awe of the convert; we didn't even retain a polemical disdain for the book's sophistries. We simply found the book trite. Nozick's book generated excitement among a generation of philosophers trained in logic chopping and little else. Since logic chopping is a useful but minor instrument, they were left at a loss -- what do you do once you have diagrammed the prisoner's dilemma ten times over? They had no sense of repertoire, which they mistook this gap in their brains for a mission to make philosophy a science. Why read anything that wasn't in English? Why read anything that was written before 1945?

Well, in one sense the logic choppers have a point. The history of philosophy is, in itself, of little importance. Carnap once noted, somewhere, his distress at the philosophy department meetings in the U. of Chicago in the 40s, where collegues would say things like, oh, the important thing about evolution is that Thomas Acquinus refuted it in such and such a tractate. In other words, learned ignorance of the most repellent type.

What reading books, not articles, and books published before 1945, and books published even in French or German, mindboggling as that is, does is, it gives one a repertoire of themes, references, and variations. This, Limited Inc would argue, is an essential feature of the intellectual vocations.

Now, Robert Nozick is dead. The Economist published a review of his new book in order to praise the man. Unfortunately, the Economist reviewer has merely grazed philosophy, no doubt in his pre-law days at some fond U. The reviewer is impressed by Nozick's less than Wildean one-liners ("Yet in the vigour of its arguments, the punch of its formulations (taxation is �on a par with forced labour�; �to each as they choose, from each as they are chosen�) and the breadth of its attack, the book had an impact far beyond the academic world); he is obviously sympathetic with Nozick's conservativism; but he has no idea what philosophers, like, do. Here's a sample graf:

"After his first book, he turned to pure philosophy, joking that he did not want to write "Anarchy, State and Utopia II". In 1981 came "Philosophical Explanations", which contains a famous chapter asking a seemingly bootless question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?", as well as chapters on personal identity and on free will. It is best remembered for an ingenious argument against scepticism, and for a dispositional account of knowledge as true belief that would reliably stick with the truth (or self-correct) as relevant circumstances changed."

Wow. The reviewer has obviously never heard of Leibnitz -- and God knows what he thinks Heidegger did (most likely, he gets his idea of big H from the journals, and so thinks of Heidegger as Hitler's speech writer). The bootless question is also taken up by Shestov, figures in Sartre, and has been trampled on by hundreds of the lesser fry. And as for the Quinean tang of the Nozick's dispositional thesis, forget it. It is way over the reviewer's head.

However, it is the grace note at the end that will make the literate reader wince.

"Philosophy begins in wonder, he writes at the end, with a silent nod to A.N. Whitehead." That silent nod is Nozick snoozing off. We are riffing on a platitude that goes back to Aristotle. And not the Onassis one. The Economist would do well to select its encomiasts for dead philosophers among a pool of writers that has read one or two of them.