Epistemology

Philosophical Explanations

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Robert Nozick

1981

Philosophical Explanations (1981) is Nozick's most ambitious and wide-ranging philosophical work — a 700-page exploration of the deepest questions of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. In contrast to his debut's combative style, Nozick here adopts a deliberately exploratory and non-coercive approach: rather than proving his conclusions, he aims to explain why they might be true and to illuminate the philosophical landscape around them. The book's most influential contribution is the "tracking" theory of knowledge: a person knows that P if and only if their belief tracks the truth — they would not believe P if P were false (sensitivity), and they would believe P if P were true (adherence). This counterfactual analysis handles Gettier cases more elegantly than its predecessors and led to a generation of debate about the nature of epistemic justification. The book also contains influential work on the nature of identity (the "closest continuer" theory of personal identity), free will (the notion of self-synthesis through choice), the foundations of ethics, and the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Philosophical Explanations established Nozick as one of the most creative and wide-ranging analytic philosophers of his generation.