Dr. Nicholas Rescher
Distinguished
University Professor of Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh
1012 Cathedral of Learning
Pittsburgh PA 15260
Phone: (412) 624-5950
Fax: (412) 383-7506
E-Mail:
rescher@pitt.edu
Born
in Hagen, Germany in 1928, Nicholas Rescher came to the USA at the age of ten.
He is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at be University of
Pittsburgh where he has also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department
and a Director (and currently Chairman) of the Center for Philosophy of
Science. In a productive research career extending over six decades has
established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style with over one
hundred books to this credit, ranging over all areas of philosophy with sixteen
of them translated from English into eight other languages. His work envisions
a dialectical tension between our synoptic aspirations for useful knowledge and
our human limitations as finite inquirers. The elaboration of this project
represents a many-sided approach to fundamental philosophical issues that
weaves together threads of thought from the philosophy of science, and from
continental idealism and American pragmatism. And apart from this larger
program Rescher has made various specific contributions to logic including the “Rescher
quantifier” and the conception autodescriptive systems of many-valued 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. The Encyclopedia of Bioethics
credits Rescher with writing one of the very first articles in the field.
Twelve 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-two--a 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 as well as Secretary
General of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Sciences. He
was the founding editor of the American
Philosophical Quarterly. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain, 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
A lifelong student of the
work of the philosopher Leibniz, Rescher is responsible for the rediscovery and
restoration of Leibniz's cipher machine, a contrivance some 250 years ahead of
its time in capability.
To acknowledge some extensive
gifting and to recognize his fifty years of service to the institution, the
University of Pittsburgh established in 2010 the substantial Nicholas Rescher
Prize for Contributions to Systematic Philosophy.
List of Publications--Books List of Publications--Articles
Reviews Chronological List of Books Entries in Reference Works
Books by Nicholas Rescher in German Books By Nicholas Rescher in Spanish
Academic Vita Appendix to Academic Vita
Ideas and Innovations Eponymously Associated with Nicholas Rescher
For further information regarding
Rescher and his work see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Rescher
Regarding the publication of
Nicholas Rescher's Collected Papers see:
Also see Nicholas Rescher | University of Pittsburgh - Academia.edu