Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World

by Robert Nozick

Recent scientific advances have placed many traditional philosophical concepts under great stress. In this pathbreaking book, the eminent philosopher Robert Nozick rethinks and transforms the concepts of truth, objectivity, necessity, contingency, consciousness, and ethics. Using an original method, he presents bold new philosophical theories that take account of scientific advances in physics, evolutionary biology, economics, and cognitive neuroscience, and casts current cultural controversies (such as whether all truth is relative and whether ethics is objective) in a wholly new light. Throughout, the book is open to, and engages in, the bold exploration of new philosophical possibilities.

Philosophy will never look the same. Truth is embedded in space-time and is relative to it. However, truth is not socially relative among human beings (extraterrestrials are another matter). Objective facts are invariant under specified transformations; objective beliefs are arrived at by a process in which biasing factors do not play a significant role. Necessity's domain is contracted (there are no important metaphysical necessities; water is not necessarily H2O) while the important and useful notion of degrees of contingency is elaborated. Gradations of consciousness (based upon "common registering") yield increasing capacity to fit actions to the world. The originating function of ethics is cooperation to mutual benefit, and evolution has instilled within humans a "normative module": the capacities to learn, internalize, follow norms, and make evaluations. Ethics has normative force because of the connection between ethics and conscious self-awareness. Nozick brings together the book's novel theories to show the extent to which there are objective ethical truths.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Metaphysics, Reference

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Robert Nozick was an American philosopher and professor at Harvard University. He was educated at Columbia (A.B. 1959, summa cum laude), where he studied with Sidney Morgenbesser, at Princeton (Ph.D. 1963), and Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar. He was a prominent American political philosopher in the 1970s and 1980s. He did additional but less influential work in such subjects as decision theory and epistemology. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) was a libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. He was born in Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish entrepreneur from Russia, and married the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Nozick died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with cancer. His remains are interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nozick's final book before dying of cancer. "A series of philosophical forays" into: truth & relativism, invariance & objectivity, necessity & contingency ("lack of invention is the mother of necessity"), the realm of consciousness, and the genealogy of ethics.

The first line: "Philosophy begins in wonder".
The final paragraph in his final book: "It is not possible (for us) to look at a child and know what the adult he will grow up to be will look like, yet we are able to look at an adult and see how he came to be from the child he was in the photograph we now see. So too, we can hope, even though we cannot picture the philosophers of the future, that, whatever substances they are made of and whatever beings they are descended from, and whatever new things they discover and whatever new questions thye pose and whatever complex interactions they stand in to alter their levels of consciousness and creation, they will be able to look back upon us and recognize us as kin.
Philosophy begins in wonder. It never ends".

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read. The important contribution of the work is an account of objectivity in terms of invariances under certain transformations and a coherent defense of relativism. The book covers several important areas of philosophy, but unfortunately, Nozick is biting off far more than he can chew. He leans heavily on popsci versions of (alas, very dated) string theory, quantum mechanics, and game theory to prop up his positions. Sometimes this works, but I don't think it does in his discussion on the problem of consciousness. The work on ethics is more promising. I particularly liked Nozick's idea of winner-take-proportional-all...but this is sadly only discussed for a paragraph. The writing style is somewhat dry and, as such, I would recommend a more lively treatment of objectivity before "Invariances" (in particular, I would recommend Brian Cantwell Smith's "On the Origin of Objects").

[Volbet · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll give Robert Nozick this: he doesn't lack confidence and ambition. If nothing else, Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World is one of the most balls-to-the-wall analytical defenses of relativism and one of the most self-assured takes on philosophy's place in the modern world.

However, Nozick is going extremely close to pure quackery in his approach to quantum mechanics, cosmology, biology and sociology. The only thing that saves Nozick from just sounding like your weird uncle that smokes too much weed, is his adherence to a strict methodology, a brilliant sense for logic, and a compelling way to construct and present his arguments.
But like with most of Nozick's works, the problem with this book comes back to the assumptions that the reader needs to buy into in order to buy the argument. Especially Nozick's adherence to a functionalistic, methodological individualism in the chapter on ethics might be hard to swallow for most readers.

[Zach Mackin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the more brilliant authors I’ve ever read

[Romeo Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Under rated. Probably seems dry on first impression until you realize how ambitious what he's trying to do it. This is an attempt at sketching out what sorts of de-facto answers humans come up with for the is-ought problem and what that might say about philosophy of science and the human experience.

[Alexandre Guay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plusieurs arguments de Nozick sont assez faibles mais ce livre est un stimulant indéniable à la réflexion.