Rescher Studies: A Collection of Essays on the Philosophical Work of Nicholas Rescher

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In a career extending over almost six decades, Nicholas Rescher has conducted researches in almost every principal area of philosophy, historical and systematic alike. In this extraordinary volume, two dozen scholars join in offering penetrating discussions of various facets of Rescher’s investigations. The result is an instructively critical panorama of the many-faceted contributions of this important American philosopher. 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. CONTENTS Preface: ROBERT Almeder The Limits of Science, Realism,and IdealismRobert Almeder On Possibilities and Thought ExperimentsDiderik Batens Coherentism and Coherence Truth in thePhilosophy of Nicholas RescherBryson Brown Philosophical AnthropologyJames W. Felt Pluralism and ConsensusLenn E. Goodman Meditations, Wagers, and ExistentialIssues: Nicholas Rescher on Religionand PhilosophyJohn Haldane Rescher’s MetaphysicsWilliam Jaworski The Limits of Science ReconsideredUlrich Majer ConceivabilityDiego Marconi1. RESCHER AND POSSIBILITY Weird WorldsRobert K MeyerINTRODUCTION Nicholas Rescher on Greek Philosophy andthe SyllogismJürgen MittelstrassPeter Schroeder-Heister Rescher’s Evolutionary EpistemologyJesús Mosterín Common SenseJoseph C. Pitt Systematic Philosophy and TheoreticalFramework on Nicholas Rescher’s A Systemof Pragmatic IdealismLorenz B. Puntel On Rescher’s View of Idealism(and Pragmatism)Tom Rockmore Rescher on Arabic LogicTony Street Philosophy in the FutureAvrum Stroll Rescher on Explanation and PredictionBas C. van Fraassen Nicholas Rescher on Scientific Progress:Science in the Face of Limited Cognitive andTechnological ResourcesTheodor LeiberRoland Wagner-Döbler Rescher on Dialog Systems, Argumentation,and Burden of ProofDouglas WaltonDavid M. Godden Rescher on Process ThoughtMichel Weber How is Scientific Knowledge EconomicallyPossible?: Nicholas Rescher’s Contributionsto an Economic Understanding of ScienceJames R. Wible Possibility, Plenitude, and the OptimalWorld: Rescher on Leibniz’s CosmologyCatherine Wilson Rescher on Aporetics and ConsistencyJohn Woods Responses to the Contributed Essays Work by and about Nicholas Rescher