Nicholas Rescher

Nicholas Rescher (born July 15, 1928 in Hagen, Germany) is an American philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh. In a productive research career extending over six decades, Rescher has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style and author of a system of pragmatic idealism which weaves together threads of thought from continental idealism and American pragmatism. He is the exponent of a realistic pragmatism which, rejecting the deconstructive approach of some recent pragmatists, construes pragmatic efficacy as an evidential index for such normative features as truth and validity rather than being a substitute or replacement for them. And apart from this larger program Rescher’s many-sided work has made significant contributions to logic (the conception autodescriptive systems of many-sided logic), to the history of logic (the medieval Arabic theory of modal syllogistic), to the theory of knowledge (epistemetrics as a quantitative approach in theoretical epistemology), to the philosophy of science (in particular it its economic aspects and as regards the relation of science and religion). Rescher has also worked in the area of futuristics, and along with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey is co-inaugurator of the so-called Delphi method of forecasting. The Encyclopedia of Bioethics credits Rescher with writing one of the very first articles in the field.

One of the first among the increasing number of contemporary exponents of philosophical idealism, Rescher has been active in the rehabilitation of the coherence theory of truth and in the reconstruction of philosophical pragmatism in line with the idealistic tradition. He has pioneered the development of inconsistency-tolerant logics and, in the philosophy of science, the logarithmic retardation theory of scientific progress based on the epistemological principle that our knowledge in a field does not increase in proportion with the volume of information but only with its logarithm.

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Career

Rescher came to the United States in 1938 at the age of nine. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps during 1952-54, and during 1954-56 worked in the Mathematics Division of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1951, the youngest person—22 at the time—ever to do so in that department.[1]

During his formative years, Rescher was a student of Carl Gustav Hempel in philosophy of science, of Alonzo Church in logic, Walter Terence Stace in metaphysics, and of Banesh Hoffmann in differential geometry. In 1957-59 Rescher studied Arabic with S.D. Goiten at the University of Pennsylvania, and over the next four years he issued various publications about medieval Arabic Logic.

Rescher arrived at the University of Pittsburgh in 1961 where has been a faculty member ever since. He is a former chair of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Philosophy and currently co-chairs the Center for Philosophy of Science with the status of Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy. Having begun his teaching career with a preceptorship at Princeton in 1960, he continues to be active in this role.

He is among the most prolific of contemporary scholars, having written about 400 articles and 100 books, ranging over many areas of philosophy. Works by Rescher have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Japanese. Rescher serves on the editorial board of some dozen academic professional publications, including Process Studies, the principal academic journal for process philosophy and theology. Some dozen books about Rescher’s work have appeared in English, German, and Italian and Arabic. For over three decades Rescher served as editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly.

He has lectured at universities in many countries, and has held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg. He has held fellowships from the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. A former president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, of the Metaphysical Society of America, of the C. S. Peirce Society, and of the G. W. Leibniz Society of America. Rescher has also served as member of the Board of Directors of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies, an organ of UNESCO. His contributions to philosophy have been recognized by honorary degrees awarded by eight universities on three continents.

He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Cardinal Mercier Prize for International Philosophy in 2005, and the American Catholic Philosophical Society's Aquinas medal in 2007. In response to his substantial gift to its philosophy archive, the University of Pittsburgh established in 2010 a biennial Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy, to honor an internationally acknowledged contribution with a gold medal and an award of $25,000.

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 and is also a member of the Academia Europaea and of the Royal Society of Canada.[1] In 2011 the German Federal Republic awarded Rescher its premier Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz Erster Klasse) for his services to philosophy and to German-American collaboration in the field.

In 1968 Rescher married Dorothy Henle and they have three children, Mark (b. 1969), Owen (b. 1970), and Catherine (b. 1975). By an earlier marriage he also has a daughter Elizabeth (b. 1960). His life is detailed in an Autobiography (Frankfurt: ONTOS, 2007). He is a cousin of the eminent orientalist Oskar Rescher.

Ideas

Rescher has written on a wide range of topics, including logic, epistemology, the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and the philosophy of value. He is best known as an advocate of pragmatism and, more recently, of process philosophy.

Over the course of his six decade research career, Rescher has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style, and the author of a system of pragmatic idealism that combines elements of continental idealism with American pragmatism. To this end, he:

Apart from this larger program, Rescher has made significant contributions to:

One central theme of his thought is the role of unknowing, uncertainty, risk, and luck in human affairs. The resultant need for orientation and support amidst the challenges of life in conditions so largely beyond our control as a prime pillar of religion.

During the 1960s and 70s Rescher worked extensively in symbolic and philosophical logic, contributing various innovations in many-sided logic and temporal logic, including the conception of autodescriptive systems of many-valued logic. He has also contributed to futuristics, and with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey, invented the Delphi method of forecasting.

A lifelong aficionado of the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz, Rescher has been instrumental in the reconstruction of Leibniz’s machina deciphratoria, an ancestor of the famous Enigma cipher machine.

Eponymous concepts

Works

OUP = Oxford University Press. PUP = Princeton University Press. SUNY Press = State University of New York Press. UPA = University Press of America. UPP = University of Pittsburgh Press.

See also

References

  1. ^ "Rescher elected AAAS fellow", University Times (University of Pittsburgh), 2009-05-14, http://mac10.umc.pitt.edu/u/FMPro?-db=ustory&-lay=a&-format=d.html&storyid=8705&-Find, retrieved 2009-05-15 
  2. ^ 1984, "The Limits of Science" in Paul Weingartner and Hans Czermak, eds., Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the 7th International Wittgenstein Symposium: 223-231.

External links