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 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, 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. In
2011 he was awarded the premier cross of the Order of Merit (Bundesdienstkreuz Erster Klasse) of the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition
of contributions to philosophy and to German-American cooperation in this
domain.
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:
http://www.ontos-verlag.de
Also see Nicholas Rescher |
University of Pittsburgh - Academia.edu