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When I entered the graduate program in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in 1961, Nicholas Rescher had just joined the department of philosophy' to begin, with Adolf Grunbaum, the building of what is now a philosophy center of worldwide renown. Very soon his exceptional energy and versatility were in evidence, as he founded the American Philosophical Quarterly, generated a constantly rising stack of preprints, pursued impor tant scholarly research in Arabic logic, taught a staggering diversity of histori cal and thematic courses, and obtained, in cooperation with Kurt Baier, a major grant for work in value theory. That is all part of the record. What may come as a surprise is that n...
This book presents twenty essays by Nicholas Rescher, representing more than a decade of his work. The first part of the collection offers thoughts on the history of philosophy from the Presocratics to the twentieth century; the second part features essays on epistemology, the philosophy of science, metaphysics, the theory of historiography, and the logic of temporal concepts. Despite the range of topics, all essays are closely integrated at the methodological level.
Pragmatism is rooted in the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice. Pragmatism was intended, by Charles S. Peirce, its founder, as a doctrine for the rational substantiation of knowledge claims. For Peirce, what mattered was successful prediction and control. Practice was to serve as the arbiter of theory. Objective efficacy, not personal satisfaction, is what matters for fixing opinion in a community of rational inquirers.According to Nicholas Rescher, later pragmatists saw the matter differently. They envisioned subjective satisfactions, rather than objectively ...
Nicholas Rescher has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in philosophy, writing on many different areas from logic to philosophy of language, epistemology, pragmatism, ethics and political philosophy, and metaphilosophy. Reason, Method, and Value: A Reader on the Philosophy of Nicholas Rescher offers a selection of Rescher's writings over a span of decades representing the core of his prodigious research interests in six key areas. Each section of the *Reader* is accompanied by a compact critical introduction written by a leading philosophical scholar with spezial expertise in Rescher's philosophy, and the volume opens with an appreciative introduction written by the editor and a concluding retrospective by Rescher, looking back over his oeuvre and explaining connecting themes and the unity of system contained in this extensive body of work. Taken together, the volume encapsulates the heart of Rescher's impressive lifelong contributions to philosophy between two covers, in a single volume that provides a solid overview of his thought while serving to direct readers to the corpus of Rescher's writings for amore complete picture.
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 Cent...
This work manages to present a complete and informative overview of Nicholas Rescher’s philosphy. A prominent representative of contemporary pragmatism and of 20th century’s thought at large, Rescher wrote an impressive amount of volumes and essays on a wide variety of philosophical topics. The present book purports to make his theses and theories accessible in one single volume. Moreover, it provides an apparatus of references to the relevant literature produced by Rescher’s critics, and positions his work in the wider setting of its links with various contemporary American and European philosophers. The mixture of pragmatism and idealism, typical of Rescher’s stance, is carefully taken into account, along with his contributions to logic, philosophy of science, metaphysics, theory of knowledge, ethics, social and political philosophy.
The realities of mankind's cognitive situation are such that our knowledge of the world's ways is bound to be imperfect. None the less, the theory of unknowability—agnoseology as some have called it—is a rather underdeveloped branch of philosophy. In this philosophically rich and groundbreaking work, Nicholas Rescher aims to remedy this. As the heart of the discussion is an examination of what Rescher identifies as the four prime reasons for the impracticability of cognitive access to certain facts about the world: developmental inpredictability, verificational surdity, ontological detail, and predicative vagrancy. Rescher provides a detailed and illuminating account of the role of each of these factors in limiting human knowledge, giving us an overall picture of the practical and theoretical limits to our capacity to know our world.
Nicholas Rescher has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in philosophy, writing on many different areas from logic to philosophy of language, epistemology, pragmatism, ethics and political philosophy, and metaphilosophy. Reason, Method, and Value: A Reader on the Philosophy of Nicholas Rescher offers a selection of Reschers writings over a span of decades representing the core of his prodigious research interests in six key areas. Each section of the reader is accompanied by a compact critical introduction written by a leading philosophical scholar with special expertise in Reschers philosophy, and the volume opens with an appreciative introduction written by the editor and a concluding retrospective by Rescher, looking back over his oeuvre and explaining connecting themes and the unity of system contained in this extensive body of work. Taken together, the volume encapsulates the heart of Reschers impressive lifelong contributions to philosophy between two covers, in a single volume that provides a solid overview of his thought while serving to direct readers to the corpus of Reschers writings for amore complete picture.
Pragmatism and Objectivity illuminates the nature of contemporary pragmatism against the background of Rescher’s work, resulting in a stronger grasp of the prospects and promises of this philosophical movement. The central insight of pragmatism is that we must start from where we find ourselves and deflate metaphysical theories of truth in favor of an account that reflects our actual practices of the concept. Pragmatism links truth and rationality to experience, success, and action. While crude versions of pragmatism state that truth is whatever works for a person or a community, Nicholas Rescher has been at the forefront of arguing for a more sophisticated pragmatist position. According t...
Nicholas Rescher stands as a major figure in American Philosophy today. His philosophical contribution, ranging over fifty years, is marked by a profound respect for the fate of the human condition in a world of unparalleled scientific and technological innovation. This work brings under the centrally unifying theme of 'rationality' some of the issues on values and personal responsibility he has addressed during his long and distinguished career. The book is intended to illustrate the synthesis of Rescher’s thinking relative to these ideas, as expounded upon for many decades.