Ethics

The Examined Life

♡+

Robert Nozick

1989

The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (1989) is Nozick's most personal and accessible philosophical work — a series of meditations on the questions that matter most in a human life: love, sex, parents and children, creativity, happiness, the value of philosophical activity, dying, the meaning of life, and the nature of the divine. Written after a cancer diagnosis, the book is deliberately non-technical and personal in tone, drawing on Nozick's own life and experience as well as on the full range of philosophy, literature, and psychology. Its method is exploratory rather than argumentative: Nozick is less interested in proving theses than in thinking carefully through the texture of human experience and identifying what makes a life genuinely worth living. The book defends a conception of the good life as one in which light, understanding, and love are in continuous reciprocal exchange — a life oriented not just toward well-being but toward reality, in which one's inner and outer lives are in authentic contact with what is actually the case. The Examined Life is unusual in analytic philosophy for its willingness to address the existential and spiritual dimensions of human life with philosophical rigour and personal honesty.