18 Facts About Nicholas Rescher

Nicholas Rescher was chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science and chairman of the philosophy department.

Nicholas Rescher was the founder of American Philosophical Quarterly, History of Philosophy Quarterly, and Public Affairs Quarterly.

Nicholas Rescher died in Pittsburgh on January 5,2024, at the age of 95.

Nicholas Rescher relocated to the United States when he was 10 and became a naturalized United States citizen in 1944.

The orientalist Oskar Nicholas Rescher is the first cousin of his father.

Nicholas Rescher began his career as an academic at Princeton University in 1951.

Nicholas Rescher 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.

From 1980 to 1981, Nicholas Rescher served as the chairman of the philosophy department.

In July 1988, Nicholas Rescher changed roles at the Center for Philosophy of Science, resigning as its director and becoming its chairman.

Nicholas Rescher was a prolific writer, with over 100 books and 400 articles, generating the jest that Nicholas Rescher is not a single person, but a committee sharing the name.

Philosopher Michele Marsonet, who has published extensively on Nicholas Rescher's philosophy, writes that his prolific publication is in itself the most common objection against Nicholas Rescher, adding "it is, indeed, a leitmotiv of all those unwilling to discuss his ideas".

Nicholas Rescher's work envisions a dialectical tension between our synoptic aspirations for useful knowledge and our human limitations as finite inquirers.

Nicholas Rescher is known for his system of pragmatic idealism, which synthesizes British idealism with the pragmatism of the US 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 1966, Rescher collaborated with Herbert A Simon on a ground-breaking paper on the theory of causality.

Nicholas Rescher had contributed to futuristics, and with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey, invented the Delphi method of forecasting.

Leibniz, Nicholas Rescher has been instrumental in the reconstruction of Leibniz's machina deciphratoria, an ancestor of the famous Enigma cipher machine.

Nicholas Rescher was 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.

Nicholas Rescher's A Journey through Philosophy in 101 Anecdotes is a successful framework to reach a broader audience in the field.