Nicholas Rescher
ACADEMIC VITA
Nicholas Rescher
was born in
In a productive research career extending over six decades,
Rescher has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style
and author of a system of pragmatic idealism which weaves together threads of
thought from continental idealism and American pragmatism. And apart from this larger program Rescher’s
many-sided work has made significant contributions to logic (the conception autodescriptive systems of many-sided logic), to the
history of logic (the medieval Arabic theory of modal syllogistic), to the
theory of knowledge (epistemetrics as a quantitative
approach in theoretical epistemology), to the philosophy of science (the theory
of a logarithmic returns in scientific effort). Rescher has also worked in the
area of futuristics, and along with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey is
co-inaugurator of the so-called
One of the few contemporary exponents of philosophical idealism,
Rescher has been active in the rehabilitation of the coherence theory of truth
and in the reconstruction of philosophical pragmatism in line with the
idealistic tradition. He has pioneered
the development of inconsistency-tolerant logics and, in the philosophy of
science, the logarithmic retardation theory of scientific progress based on the
epistemological principle that our knowledge in a field does not increase in
proportion with the volume of information but only with its logarithm. Some dozen books about Rescher’s work
have appeared in English, German, and Italian and Arabic. His contributions to philosophy have been
recognized by honorary degrees awarded by eight universities on three
continents.
For over three decades Rescher has been editor of the American
Philosophical Quarterly. The author of more than seventy books in various
areas of philosophy, works by Mr. Rescher have been
translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Japanese. He has lectured at universities in many
countries, and has occupied visiting posts at various universities in
An honorary member of
Rescher has been commissioned to undertake support studies for
Congressional committees on science/technology matters and has been invited to
testify before Committee on Science and Technology on issues of space
exploration and colonization.