American - Philosopher | November 16, 1938 - January 23, 2002
It is, from another angle, an attack on requiring proof in philosophy. And it's also the case, I guess, that my temperament is to like interesting, new, bold ideas, and to try and generate them.
Robert Nozick
IdeasInterestingPhilosophyBold
It's the level that allows us each to live our own chosen lives. But I notice not everyone agrees with the primary importance of that level, and I try to account for how they don't.
LiveTryEveryoneOwnLevelUs
The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.
SurpriseMoreTheoryThingsQuantum
There is no justifiable prediction about how the hypothesis will hold up in the future; its degree of corroboration simply is a historical statement describing how severely the hypothesis has been tested in the past.
FuturePastWillDegreeHistorical
Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution 'to each according to his merit or value.'
ValuePeopleSocietyFeelReward
Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.
SameEntitlementSystemWorkersOnly
The fundamental question of political philosophy, one that precedes questions about how the state should be organized, is whether there should be any state at all. Why not have anarchy?
PoliticalQuestionsPhilosophyWhy
There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is that something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall social good covers this up.
GoodPeopleDoneNothingTalkMore
Whoever makes something, having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process... is entitled to it. The situation is not one of something's getting made, and there being an open question of who is to get it. Things come into the world already attached to people having entitlement over them.
PeopleWorldProcessSituationOver
What I was really saying in 'The Examined Life' was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before.
LifeSayingLibertarianBeenBefore
Faith is caused by an encounter with something very real but which has extraordinary qualities which intimate the divine; the belief is due to an encounter which specially mirrors some divine quality.
FaithQualityMirrorsBeliefReal
Perhaps faith is a faith in one's self, the belief that one wouldn't feel so moved by the encounter if it weren't divine, a trust in one's own deepest positive responses. To doubt it would involve a self-alienation.
PositiveFaithTrustSelfFeelOwn
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