There are few books that set out what a mature person can believe - someone fully grown up, I mean. Aristotle's 'Ethics', Marcus Aurelius's 'Meditati… - Robert Nozick
" "There are few books that set out what a mature person can believe - someone fully grown up, I mean. Aristotle's 'Ethics', Marcus Aurelius's 'Meditations', Montaigne's 'Essays', and the essays of Samuel Johnson come to mind. Even with these, we do not simply accept everything that is said. The author's voice is never our own, exactly; the author's life is never our own. It would be disconcerting, anyway, to find that another person holds precisely our views, responds with our particular sensibility, and thinks the same things important. Still, we gain from these books, weighing and pondering ourselves in their light. These books - and also some less evidently grown-up ones, Thoreau's 'Walden' and Nietzsche's writings, for example - invite or urge us to think along with them, branching in our own directions. We are not identical with the books we read, but neither would we be the same without them.
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About Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick (16 November 1938 – 23 January 2002) was an American libertarian philosopher and Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University.
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Alternative Names:
Robert Edwin Nozick
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There will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.
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The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources; it treats us as persons having individual rights with the dignity this constitutes. Treating us with respect by respecting our rights, it allows us, individually or with whom we choose, to choose our life and to realize our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity. How dare any state or group of individuals do more. Or less.
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