Nicholas Rescher

55
Nicholas Rescher bigraphy, stories - Philosophers

Nicholas Rescher : biography

15 July 1928 –

Nicholas Rescher (born July 15, 1928) is a German-American philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the Co-Chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science. 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. He is the exponent of a realistic pragmatism which, rejecting the deconstructive approach of the neopragmatists, construes pragmatic efficacy as an evidential index for such normative features as truth and validity rather than being a substitute or replacement for them. And apart from this larger program Rescher’s many-sided work has made significant contributions to logic (the conception autodescriptive systems of many-valued 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 (in particular in its economic aspects and as regards the relation of science and religion). 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. The Encyclopedia of Bioethics credits Rescher with writing one of the very first articles in the field. Rescher converted to Roman Catholicism in 1981.http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23281-issues-in-the-philosophy-of-religion/

One of the first among the increasing number of 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.

Ideas

Rescher has written on a wide range of topics, including logic, epistemology, the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and the philosophy of value. He is best known as an advocate of pragmatism and, more recently, of process philosophy.

Over the course of his six decade research career, Rescher has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style, and the author of a system of pragmatic idealism that combines elements of continental idealism with American pragmatism. To this end, he:

  • Projects a system of pragmatic idealism, in which the activity of the human mind makes a formative contribution to the substance of knowledge, and "valid" knowledge contributes to practical success;
  • Defends a coherence theory of truth in a manner differing somewhat from that of classical idealism; see e.g. his exchange in The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (in the Library of Living Philosophers series);
  • Defends a version of process metaphysics that defines items less in terms of their description than in that of their modus operandi, understanding what things are in terms of what they do. (Thus ideas acquire an enhanced status in relation to physical things.)
  • Advocates an "erotetic propagation" of science, asserting that scientific inquiry will continue without end because each newly answered question adds a presupposition for at least one more open question to the current body of scientific knowledge.1984, "The Limits of Science" in Paul Weingartner and Hans Czermak, eds., Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the 7th International Wittgenstein Symposium: 223-231.
  • Propounds an epistemic law of diminishing returns which holds that actual knowledge merely stands as the logarithm of the available information. This has the corollary that the comparative growth of knowledge is inversely propositional to the volume of information already at hand, so that when information grows exponentially, knowledge will grow at a merely linear rate.
  • Articulates a theory of axiogenesis which addresses some of the fundamental questions of philosophical metaphysics on the basis of value-eared considerations.