Introduction: rationality in general

Philosophical Explanations is a long book, and there is much in it that we have not discussed and must defer until later chapters, but the topics that fill Nozick's later book The Nature of Rationality are connected so closely in subject matter to the epistemology of Philosophical Explanations that it clearly makes sense to bring them in now. The two books are separated by a volume of essays, The Examined Life, that takes much further than Philosophical Explanations the informal style and new outlook on philosophy that we discussed in our first chapter. The Nature of Rationality refers back several times to items in this, but itself returns to a more rigorous style, and promises to be “awash in technical details” (NR: xiv), but not, the reader may note perhaps with relief, to anything like the extent of many contemporary philosophical articles.

While Philosophical Explanations in its third chapter was concerned with what knowledge is and what sort of things we can know, especially in relation to scepticism, The Nature of Rationality asks what strategies our thinking can adopt and how we should assess them, as well as seeking the historical origins of our present overall ways of thinking and the significance of those origins. It perhaps ties up most closely with Philosophical Explanations' discussion of evidence. We found that in Philosophical Explanations Nozick saw himself as primarily an externalist although with some internalist leanings.