20th century · 1938–2002
Who influenced Robert Nozick?
Influences
Anarchy, state, utopia: the minimal state, entitlement theory, and the Wilt Chamberlain example.
Robert Nozick was influenced by John Locke and John Rawls. That is 2 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Libertarian Review, Public domain See the whole map
Who was Robert Nozick?
Robert Nozick taught at Harvard and is best known for Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian reply to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice that defends the minimal state as the only justifiable form of government.
In Philosophical Explanations (1981) he proposed a counterfactual theory of knowledge. He also wrote on decision theory, the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, and in his last book, Invariances (2001), argued that objectivity itself emerged through evolution.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Robert Nozick?
2 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- John Locke 1632–1704
- John Rawls 1921–2002
The line of teachers behind Robert Nozick
The longest documented line of influence ending at Robert Nozick runs 21 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
- Thales of Miletus
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Anaxagoras
- Socrates
- Antisthenes
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Crates of Thebes
- Zeno of Citium
- Seneca
- Tertullian
- Augustine of Hippo
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Peter Lombard
- Thomas Aquinas
- René Descartes
- Thomas Hobbes
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Christian Wolff
- Immanuel Kant
- John Rawls
- Robert Nozick
Two steps away from Robert Nozick
Indirect influences
- Through John Rawls: Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill
- Through John Locke: René Descartes
Contemporaries of Robert Nozick
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Robert Nozick, with no direct line between them.
- Tzvetan Todorov 1939–2017
- Saul Kripke 1940–2022
- Edward Said 1935–2003
- David Lewis 1941–2001
- Derek Parfit 1942–2017
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016
- John Searle 1932–2025
- Richard Rorty 1931–2007
Robert Nozick by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 2
- Direct followers
- 0
- Thinkers upstream
- 93
- Thinkers downstream
- 0
- Wikipedia languages
- 50 — #49 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Epic
Questions about Robert Nozick
- Who influenced Robert Nozick?
- John Locke and John Rawls.
- Who did Robert Nozick influence?
- No later thinker on this map is recorded as drawing directly on Robert Nozick.
- When did Robert Nozick live?
- 1938–2002. The map files Robert Nozick under the 20th century.
- How rare is the Robert Nozick card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Robert Nozick in 50 languages, which makes it an Epic card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 20th-century philosophers
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
- Albert Camus 1913–1960
- Max Weber 1864–1920
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016