Nicholas Rescher

Career

Rescher began his career as an academic at Princeton University in 1951. He joined the philosophy department at the University of Pittsburgh in 1961, becoming the first associate director of its new Center for Philosophy of Science the following year. In 1964, he founded the American Philosophical Quarterly. From 1980 to 1981, Rescher served as the chairman of the philosophy department. In July 1988, Rescher changed roles at the Center for Philosophy of Science, resigning as its director and becoming its chairman. In 2010, he donated his philosophy collection to the Hillman Library.

An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain, the Academia Europaea, the Royal Society of Canada, and the Institut International de Philosophie, among others.

Rescher was a prolific writer, with over 100 books and 400 articles, generating the jest that Rescher is not a single person, but a committee sharing the name. Philosopher Michele Marsonet, who has published extensively on Rescher's philosophy, writes that his prolific publication is in itself the most common objection against Rescher, adding "it is, indeed, a leitmotiv of all those unwilling to discuss his ideas".

Philosophy

Rescher's university biography describes his philosophical work thus:

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.

He is known for his system of pragmatic idealism, which synthesizes British idealism with the pragmatism of the U.S. The original term he used for his system was conceptual idealism, an attempt to renew the idealist approach to knowledge in the domain of modern science.

In the mid and late 1960s, his studies were focused on medieval Arabic logic, but he soon broadened his areas of inquiry in metaphysics and epistemology, moving toward the methodological pragmatism he would define. In the 1970s, he began working more extensively with American pragmatism with a focus on the writings of C. S. Peirce, who was to number among his major influences. In 1966, Rescher collaborated with Herbert A. Simon on a ground-breaking paper on the theory of causality.

Rescher had contributed to futuristics, and with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey, invented the Delphi method of forecasting. A lifelong aficionado of the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz, Rescher has been instrumental in the reconstruction of Leibniz's machina deciphratoria, an ancestor of the famous Enigma cipher machine. Rescher was also responsible for two further items of historical rediscovery and reconstruction: the model of cosmic evolution in Anaximander, and the medieval Islamic theory of modal syllogistic.

Honors

Rescher was honored for his work. In 1984, he received the Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship. In 2005, he received the Cardinal Mercier Prize, and in 2007 the American Catholic Philosophical Society's Aquinas Medal. In 2011, his contributions as a German-American to philosophy were recognized with the premier cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Founder's Medal of the American Metaphysical Society (2016), and the Helmholtz Medal of the German Academy of Sciences Berlin-Brandenburg. He holds eight honorary degrees. Having held visiting lectureships at the University of Oxford, the University of Konstanz, the University of Salamanca, LMU Munich, and Marburg University, he has been awarded fellowships by the Ford, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundations. In April 2021, the University of Tehran held a session in his honor where Nadia Maftouni asserted:

Rescher's A Journey through Philosophy in 101 Anecdotes is a successful framework to reach a broader audience in the field. At first glance it seems an easy book to write. But at least in philosophy, it's easy to write in a complicated style and it's hard to write in a simple, clear, and readable fashion.

Prize and medal

In 2010, the University of Pittsburgh created the Dr. Nicholas Rescher Fund for the Advancement of the Department of Philosophy which bestows the Nicholas Rescher Prize for Contributions to Systematic Philosophy. The first recipient of the prize was Rescher's former student, Ernest Sosa. As of 2012, the prize included a gold medal and $25,000, subsequently raised to $30,000. Later awardees have included Alvin Plantinga, Jürgen Mittelstraß, Hilary Putnam, Ruth Millikan, and Thomas Nagel. When the American Philosophical Association inaugurated its own Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy in 2018, the University of Pittsburgh redesignated its award as the Rescher Medal.

Eponymous concepts

• Formal logic: Rescher quantifier
• Non-classical logic: Dienes–Rescher inference engine (also Rescher–Dienes implication); Rescher–Manor consequence relation
• Paraconsistent logic: Rescher–Brandom semantics
• Temporal logic: Rescher operator
• Scientometrics: Rescher's law of logarithmic returns
• Distributive justice: Rescher's effective average measure
• Dialectics: Rescher's theory of formal disputation
• Theory of luck: Rescher's luck equation

Membership in learned societies

• Academia Europaea: European Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Academie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Institut international de philosophie
• Pennsylvania Academy of Science
• Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
• Royal Society of Canada