Talk:The Examined Life

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 August 2021 and 8 October 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): LexBrown070. Peer reviewers: JSlater2119.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 11:02, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

In Our Time

The BBC programme In Our Time presented by Melvyn Bragg has an episode which may be about this subject (if not moving this note to the appropriate talk page earns cookies). You can add it to "External links" by pasting * {{In Our Time|The Examined Life|p00548dx}}. Rich Farmbrough, 03:21, 16 September 2010 (UTC).[reply]

The Examined Life and Nozick's libertarianism

Rostz restored the following material,

'In the book, Nozick disavows his earlier extreme libertarianism^[1] stating that "it did not fully knit the humane considerations and joint cooperative activities it left room for more closely into its fabric. It neglected the symbolic importance of an official political concern with issues or problems, as a way of marking their importance or urgency, and hence of expressing, intensifying, channeling, encouraging, and validating our private actions and concerns toward them."^[2]'

with this comment,

'restore; no policy restricts primary source quotation.'

The problem with the material is not that it quotes from a primary source. The problem is that it misrepresents the Guardian article as claiming that Nozick renounced his former libertarianism in The Examined Life. Anyone can read the article and see that it does no such thing; all it does is to call Nozick's book "schmaltzy". Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 19:45, 1 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The relevant paragraph from the Guardian interview is this:

"In later life, Nozick renounced extreme libertarianism, and even proposed some scheme for checks on unlimited inheritance. He said he had wanted to develop a theory of human nature and ethics to bolt on to his political theory and ground his notion of rights, but had failed. Where he did tackle human nature, the personal, "the holiness of everyday life" and its meaning, in The Examined Life (1989), he was disappointingly schmaltzy. Yet he carried many of the principles mentioned in that book into practice. Told seven years ago that he had six months to live, he responded with high-spirited defiance, and pushed the body he owned to tremendous exertions - and to far greater longevity than anticipated."

Note that while it says that Nozick renounced 'extreme libertarianism', it neither states nor implies that Nozick did this in The Examined Life. Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 19:52, 1 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Cite error: The named reference guardobit was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ Nozick, Robert (1989). The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations. p. 287. ISBN 9780671725013.

[guardobit-1] Cite error: The named reference guardobit was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[2] Nozick, Robert (1989). The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations. p. 287. ISBN 9780671725013.

[1]

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