Rescher Studies

In a career extending over almost six decades, Nicholas Rescher has conducted researches in almost every principal area of philosophy, historical and systematic alike. In this extraordinary volume, two dozen scholars join in offering penetrating discussions of various facets of Rescher's investigations. The result is an instructively critical panorama of the many-faceted contributions of this important American philosopher. Born in Germany in 1928, Nicholas Rescher came to the U.S. at the age of nine. He is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he has also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department and as director (and currently chairman) of the Center for Philosophy of Science. In a productive research career extending over six decades, he has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style. His work represents a many-sided approach to fundamental philosophical issues that weaves together threads of thought from continental idealism and American pragmatism. And apart from this larger program Rescher has made various specific contributions to logic (the conception autodescriptive systems of many-sided logic), the history of logic (the medieval Arabic theory of modal syllogistic), to the theory of knowledge (epistemetrics as a quantitative approach in theoretical epistemology), and to the philosophy of science (the theory of a logarithmic retardation of scientific progress). 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. Ten books about Rescher's philosophy have been published in four languages. Rescher earned his doctorate at Princeton in 1951 while still at the age of twenty-twoa record for Princeton's Department of Philosophy. He has served as a President of the American Philosophical Association, of the American Catholic Philosophy Association, of the American G. W. Leibniz Society, of the C. S. Peirce Society, and of the American Metaphysical Society. He was the founder of the American Philosophical Quarterly. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Royal Society of Canada, the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, he has been awarded fellowships by the Ford, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundations. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated from English into other languages, he is the recipient of eight honorary degrees from universities on three continents. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, and the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007.

Texte du rabat
Rescher's writings cover virtually every area of the subject and develop a philosophical system that has been characterized as unique in the present era for its comprehensiveness. This series presents studies designed to facilitate access to the ideas of this important contemporary thinker.

Contenu
Preface:
ROBERT ALMEDER
The Limits of Science, Realism, and Idealism:
ROBERT ALMEDER
On Possibilities and Thought Experiments:
DIDERIK BATENS
Coherentism and Coherence Truth in the Philosophy of Nicholas Rescher:
BRYSON BROWN
Philosophical Anthropology:
JAMES W. FELT
Pluralism and Consensus:
LENN E. GOODMAN
Mediations, Wagers, and Existential Issues: Nicholas Rescher on Religion and Philosophy:
JOHN HALDANE
Rescher s Metaphysics:
WILLIAM JAWORSKI
The Limits of Science Reconsidered:
ULRICH MAJER
Conceivability:
DIEGO MARCONI
Weird Worlds:
ROBERT K. MEYER
Nicholas Rescher on Greek Philosophy and the Syllogism:
JÜRGEN MITTELSTRASS and PETER SCHROEDER-HEISTER
Rescher s Evolutionary Epistemology:
JESÚS MOSTERÍN
Common Sense:
JOSEPH PITT
Systematic Philosophy and Theoretical Framework on Nicholas Rescher s A System of Pragmatic Idealism:
LORENZ B. PUNTEL
On Rescher s View of Idealism (and Pragmatism):
TOM ROCKMORE
Rescher on Arabic Logic:
TONY STREET
Philosophy in the Future:
AVRUM STROLL
Rescher on Explanation and Prediction:
BAS C. VAN FRAASSEN
Nicholas Rescher on Scientific Progress: Science in the Face of Limited Cognitive and Technological Resources:
THEODOR LEIBER and ROLAND WAGNER-DÖBLER
Rescher on Dialog Systems, Argumentation, and Burden of Proof:
DOUGLAS WALTON and DAVID M. GODDEN
Rescher on Process Thought:
MICHEL WEBER
How is Scientific Knowledge Economically Possible?: Nicholas Rescher s Contributions to an Economic
Understanding of Science:
JAMES R. WIBLE
Possibility, Plenitude, and the Optimal World: Rescher on Leibniz s Cosmology:
CATHERINE WILSON
Rescher on Aporetics and Consistency:
JOHN WOODS
Responses to the Contributed Essays:
NICHOLAS RESCHER
Work by and about Nicholas Rescher
List of Contributors