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 U.S. at the age of nine. He is Distinguished 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. The author of some 400 scholarly papers and some 100 books, Rescher’s 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 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 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.
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 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
For further information regarding
Rescher and his work see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Rescher
Regarding the publications
of Nicholas Rescher Collected Papers see:
Also see Nicholas Rescher | University of Pittsburgh - Academia.edu