Nicholas Rescher

In his autobiography he traces his descent to Nehemias Rescher (1735–1801), a founder of the Hochberg-Remseck Jewish community in Swabian Germany.

Nicholas Rescher (15 July 1928 – 5 January 2024) was a German-born American philosopher, polymath, and author, who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh from 1961.

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

Rescher served as president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Leibniz Society of North America, American Metaphysical Society, American Philosophical Association, and Charles S. Peirce Society.

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

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

Rescher was born in Hagen in the Westphalia region of Germany.

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

In 1949 he obtained a degree in mathematics at Queens College, New York, thereafter attending Princeton University and graduating with a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1951 at the age of 22, the youngest person to earn a Ph.D. in that department.

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

From 1952 to 1954 during the Korean War he served a term in the United States Marine Corps, and then from 1954 to 1957 he worked for the Rand Corporation's mathematics division.

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.

After a time at Lehigh University, he taught philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh starting in 1961.

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

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.

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, 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.

Rescher was honored for his work.

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.

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

In 1984, he received the Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship.

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

In 2005, he received the Cardinal Mercier Prize, and in 2007 the American Catholic Philosophical Society's Aquinas Medal.

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, 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".

He is known for his system of pragmatic idealism, which synthesizes British idealism with the pragmatism of the U.S.

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."

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.

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 Oxford, Konstanz, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, he has been awarded fellowships by the Ford, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundations.

In April 2021, 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."