Philosophical Explanations by Robert Noziok

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS Philosophical Explanations. By ROBERT Nozrox:. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (Belknap), 1981. Pp. 764. $25.00. Philosophical Explanations has, in whole or in part, been given a warm and friendly reception. It is certainly an important book, important for some of the arguments contained in it, important as an example of a new style of philosophizing, different from the empiricist tradition from Locke to Russell, different from the analytic tradition influenced by Wittgenstein , and perhaps important as symptomatic of some shift going on in academic philosophy. In reading the empiricists one had the initial impression that what was written was so clear that the problem was with the unfamiliarity of the thought embodied in what was said; the language seemed a translucent medium. The later Wittgenstein (or John Wisdom, or Ryle, or Anscombe, or Malcolm, or Austin-not that he was a Wittgensteinian ) seemed difficult, but the difficulty lay not in what was said-this was as plain as anything by Swift or Cobbett-but in two other things: the complexity and, as it were, the denseness of the examples offered (and it was a part of the method that the work was as full of examples as a good Christmas pudding is of raisins, currants, and other fruits), and the connections of one thought with another, as in the intricate discussion of the notion of a private language, or of remembering, or of imaging. Nozick's book seems to float above much of the discussion of the years since the second World War. It therefore presents difficulties for one, such as the reviewer, whose philosophical life began,* to go in for a bit of self-caricature, with "The world is everything that is the case" and started to slow down with Anscombe's " Causality and Determination ". Much contemporary work is available, without severe difficu:ffilty, to one with such an intellectual formation; for example, Donald Davidson's papers or Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature or the writings of Stanley Cavell. Nozick's work I don't find immediately available in the same way, perhaps in part because his prose, as well as being a loose, informal , flexible instrument, falls into obscurity at times; "this", to choose an example, often sends us searching for, and not always finding, its antecedent. *Narrowly considered. I don't mean the beginning of my thinking, which had other, and baleful, tnodels to struggle with. And of course I had read Descartes and Kant and Berkeley et al. before I ever heard the names of Peirce and Wittgenstein. 268 BOOK REVIEWS ~69 Again, Nozick's work strikes me as distinctively American in that I find, or think I find, traces of many ancestors peculiar to, or more likely to be found in, the United States: Emerson and the transcendentalists in general, even in those forms guyed by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit, William James, rabbinical commentary, perhaps Royce. There are even connections with contemporary American culture: the use of " ethical " to mean good or right-this I call the Rotarian or pharmaceutical sense. It is odd to find this use in a philosopher, for it seems to rule many obvious locutions out of order. Nozick's manner of pursuing philosophy is sketched in the Preface to his Anarchy, State, and Utopia, an ingenious, amusing, rather modish-it was given the 1975 National Book Award-work, one that looks useful to conservatives, though they should perhaps look rather carefully before adding Nozick to Friedman, Buckley, and other members of their stage army. Here are the relevant remarks; they apply with the same force to Philosophical Explanations. I write in the mode of much contemporary philosophical work in epistemology or metaphysics: there are elaborate arguments, claims rebutted by unlikely counterexamples , surprising theses, puzzles, abstract structural conditions, challenges to find another theory which fits a specified range of cases, startling conclusions, and so on. Before I give some account of the book and look at some of the ideas and arguments it contains, I begin with Nozick's defence of his title1 ,that is, his justification of the role of explanation as distinct from proof or demonstration in philosophy. His suggestion isn't...