Dr. Nicholas Rescher
Department of Philosophy
1012 Cathedral of Learning
Phone: (412)
624-5950
Fax: (412) 383-7506
E-Mail: rescher@pitt.edu
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-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. 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.
List of Publications--Books
List of Publications--Articles
Metabibliography
Reviews
Chronological
List of Books Entries in Reference Works
Books by Nicholas Rescher
in German Books By Nicholas
Rescher in Spanish
Short Academic Vita
Appendix to Academic Vita
Ideas and
Innovations Eponymously Associated with Nicholas Rescher
Current Project: Professor Rescher
is currently writing a book on freedom of the will.
Regarding
the publications of Nicholas Rescher Collected Papers see: