Nicholas Rescher
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 411054 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Nicholas Rescher |
| NOMBRES | Nicholas |
| APELLIDO | Rescher |
| FIRMA | RESCHER N |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Pittsburgh |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 191 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 148 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 187 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 7 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1952 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Ethical Idealism
Influence theory
Risk Theory
Philosophical Fallacies
Philosophy Examined
The book presents a detailed examination of many key aspects of philosophizing, ranging from the mission of philosophy, its method, its dialectic, and its epistemology. It conveys to the reader, student and scholar alike, a clear account of the aspirations and potential of the discipline. Readers will come away with a clearer understanding of the promise and challenges of philosophizing
Why Is There Anything at All?
Mit einem Initiativartikel von Nicholas Rescher, einem der profiliertesten Metaphysiker der Gegenwart, wird die dritte Jahrbuch-Kontroverse eröffnet, diesmal zu einem klassisch metaphysischen Hauptthema, nämlich der Frage von Leibniz: »Warum gibt es überhaupt etwas und nicht vielmehr nichts?« Mag zunächst der Gedanke naheliegend erscheinen, dass da, wo nichts ist, auch keinerlei fundierende Gründe bestehen können, mit Rückgriff auf die sich begrü…
Philosophical purpose and purposive philosophy
Professor Nicholas Rescher (1928-) is an unusually prolific philosopher who has published more than 175 books between 1960 and 2016.1 When I first came across his work I thought that it might be th
What If?
Thought experimentation has been a staple of philosophical methodology since classical antiquity, when Xenophanes of Colophon speculated that if horses had gods, they would be equine in form. Nicholas Rescher's What If? undertakes a systematic survey of the role and utility of thought experiments in philosophy. After surveying the historical issues, Rescher examines the principles involved, and explains the conditions under which thought experime…
Thought Experimentation in Philosophy
Thought experimentation affords philosophy with a crucially useful instrumentality of inquiry. It is a resource that is naturally suited for the sorts of inquiries that constitute the characteristic mission of an enterprise whose prime concern is not with observation but with conceptualizations . For philosophical thought experiments are generally concerned with concepts and ideas, with modes of thinking and talking. While real experiments addres…
Philosophically Instructive Paradoxes
The suppositions that project philosophical thought experiments often involve paradoxes, that is, aporetic situations in which one must somehow extract personally from inconsistency plausibilities rather than mere suppositions. This is illustrated by The Bibliography Paradox , a logical conundrum of self-reference that is based on the following riddle: It all seems plausible enough but something has gone awry. Accordingly, the line contemplated i…
Issues of Speculative Ontology
Different states of affairs, "alternative realities" can certainly be brought within the realm of contemplation by thought experiments. But any such resort to nonexistents poses special problems because unreal things and states of affairs function in ways substantially different from actual one. Accordingly, while thought experiments can contemplate alternative, nonexistent states of affairs, they cannot successfully bring alternative nonexistent…
Outlandish Hypotheses and the Limits of Thought Experimentation
Even an impossibility can be thought about, talked about, discussed, and be considered in ways that treat it merely as an object of thought. It is sometimes suggested that thought experimentation is impracticable when the projecting suppositions at issue are too unrealistic: too bizarre and overly hypothetical. A philosophical thought experiment must take care not to saw off the very limb on which its suppositions hang. And this is not just becau…
Thought Experimentation
It is simply convenience and economy of effort that leads to thought experimentation. Accordingly, thought experimentation involves five stages overall: supposition, context-specification, conclusion-deriving, lesson drawing, and synoptic reasoning. And at each of these stages a mishap or malfunction can in theory arise. But all of these different ways of simulating reality by use of artifacts afford ways of thought experimentation exactly becaus…
On Overdoing Thought Experimentation
Thought experimentation plays a pivotal role both in philosophical speculation and in philosophical elucidation. Throughout the present deliberations, there is constantly occasion for thought experimentation across the whole range of philosophical deliberation. As emphasized throughout in this chapter, ground rules of factual and fictional discourse are altogether distinct. They have very different aims and objectives in view—to elucidate reality…
Some Classic Philosophical Thought Experiments
One of the most famous of philosophical thought experiments was projected in Plato&s;s Republic . The philosophical point of Jean Buridan&s;s hypothetical example is twofold: it serves to illustrate and indicate the idea of free will. It could be argued that the mere hypothesis of an arch-deceiver is just not good enough. And it is to exhibit the special care and providence that a benign God has bestowed upon reason and "the crown of creation". R…
The Riddle of Existence
Many Valued Logic
Throughout the orthodox mainsteam of the development of logic in the West, the prevailing view was that every proposition is either true or else false (although which of these is the case may well neither be necessary as regards the matter itself nor determinable as regards our knowledge of it). This thesis, commonly called the ‘law of bivalence’ — constituting one key articulation of the ‘law of the excluded middle’ — was, however, already quest…
Induction
G. W. Leibniz's Monadology
G.W. Leibniz s Monadology, one of the most important pieces of the Leibniz corpus, is at once one of the great classics of modern philosophy and one of its most puzzling productions. Because the essay is written in so condensed and compact a fashion, for almost three centuries it has baffled and beguiled those who read it for the first time.Nicholas Rescher accompanies the text of the Monadology section-by-section with relevant excerpts from some…
Pascal's Wager
Common Sense
What If?
Thought experimentation has been a staple of philosophical methodology since classical antiquity, when Xenophanes of Colophon speculated that if horses had gods, they would be equine in form. Nicholas Rescher's What If? undertakes a systematic survey of the role and utility of thought experiments in philosophy. After surveying the historical issues, Rescher examines the principles involved, and explains the conditions under which thought experime…
Essays in the history of philosophy
Cosmic evolution in Anaximander thought experimentation in Presocratic philosophy Aristotle on Ecthesis and Apodeictic philosophy Greek scepticism's debt to the Sophists Avicenna on the logic of questions choice without preference - the problem of Buridan's Ass Pascal's wager the philosophers of gambling Leibniz finds a niche Leibniz and plurality of space-time frameworks Leibniz on creation and the evaluation of possible worlds Leibniz, Keynes, …
A system of pragmatic idealism
Philosophical Disagreement
Philosophical purpose and purposive philosophy
Professor Nicholas Rescher (1928-) is an unusually prolific philosopher who has published more than 175 books between 1960 and 2016.1 When I first came across his work I thought that it might be th
A Theory of Evidence
This is a study of the logic of the concept of evidence. Two distinct concepts of evidence will be explicated and analyzed: confirming evidence by means of which an hypothesis is established, and supporting evidence which does not establish the hypothesis, but merely renders it more tenable. The formal characteristics of each of these concepts of evidence will be examined in detail in Part II. (Part I deals with the auxiliary notion of evidential…
Peirce and the Economy of Research
The theory of the economics of research played a central role in the analysis of scientific method of Charles Sanders Peirce. The present paper describes Peirce's project as he saw it and then puts its machinery to work in an analysis of current issues in the philosophy of science. The aim is to show that, even apart from their historical interest, Peirce's ideas on this subject have a substantial systematic interest
Cause and Counterfactual
It is shown how a causal ordering can be defined in a complete structure , and how it is equivalent to identifying the mechanisms of a system. Several techniques are shown that may be useful in actually accomplishing such identification. Finally, it is shown how this explication of causal ordering can be used to analyse causal counterfactual conditionals. First the counterfactual proposition at issue is articulated through the device of a belief-…
The Problem of Uniqueness in History
The claim is frequently made that mode of explanation to be found in history differs radically and fundamentally from types of explanation found in natural or social sciences. This difference is said to lie in fact that history, unlike science, must always deal with the description of a situation or state of affairs which is unique.' It is argued that exclusive objects of historical understanding are unique, particular, concrete events: historian…
On Truth
The Coherence Theory of Truth
How serious a fallacy is inconsistency
Scientific Progress. A Philosophical Essay on the Economics of Research in Natural Science
Journal Article Scientific Progress. A Philosophical Essay on the Economics of Research in Natural Science Get access Scientific Progress. A Philosophical Essay on the Economics of Research in Natural Science. By NICHOLAS RESCHER. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978. Pp. xiv + 278. £15.00.) Marie Jahoda Marie Jahoda University of Sussex Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 89, Issue 353,…
On inference from inconsistent premisses
Philosophy and Argument
On Prediction and Explanation
Logical Analysis of Gestalt Concepts
The significance of silence
Well-timed silence has more eloquence than speech. Martin Farquhar Tupper Silence can express nothing or be meaningful. It is meaningful only in a communicative setting and, in an environment of words, silence is often the instrument of choice to communicate without explicit expression. After the last word, ‘the rest is silence’
On the status of ?things in themselves? in Kant
H 2 O
Preface . Almost fifty years ago, in 1948, when I was an undergraduate at Queens College in New York and a student of Carl G. Hempel's, I received from his hands an offprint of his now-classic but then just-published paper “Studies in the Logic of Explanation”, written in collaboration with Paul Oppenheim and then just published in Philosophy of Science (15[1948], pp. 135–75). 1 This paper greatly impressed me—and I was not alone. We have here on…
The Strife of Systems
Belief-Contravening Suppositions
The Logic of Scientific Discovery
Replies to Commentators
I feel very honored by this symposium and the critique of my work that it provides, particularly so because the contributors are, without exception, colleagues whose writings I know and esteem. And I am deeply grateful to my old friend Ernest Sosa for arranging this complex project with exemplary efficiency. As I observed on a recent occasion philosophers do not write to agree with one another, and so it does not surprise me that the contributors…
How Wide Is the Gap Between Facts and Values
Can values be derived from facts? Is it possible to effect a valid inferential transition from factual premisses to an evaluative conclusion? This issue is well worth the considerable philosophical toil and struggle that has been expended on it over the years.' For large and substantial philosophical positions are at stake with this apparently small scale and somewhat technical-seeming question. As Hume remarked (Treatise, Bk. III, Pt. I, Sect. I…
Discrete State Systems, Markov Chains, and Problems in the Theory of Scientific Explanation and Prediction
Recent discussions in the philosophy of science have devoted considerable attention to the analysis of conceptual issues relating to the methodology of explanation and prediction in the sciences. Part of this literature has been devoted to clarifying the very ideas of explanation and prediction. But the discussion has also ranged over various related topics, including the status of laws to be used for explanatory and predictive purposes, the logi…
Inference from the best systematization
Precis of A System of Pragmatic Idealism
A Theory of Possibility
Contingence in the Philosophy of Leibniz
Mr. Madden on Gestalt Theory
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A Note on a Species of Definition
Leibniz
Leibniz' Conception of Quantity, Number, and Infinity
Leibniz and Philosophical Analysis
Logical Analysis of Gestalt Concepts
A Theory of Evidence
This is a study of the logic of the concept of evidence. Two distinct concepts of evidence will be explicated and analyzed: confirming evidence by means of which an hypothesis is established, and supporting evidence which does not establish the hypothesis, but merely renders it more tenable. The formal characteristics of each of these concepts of evidence will be examined in detail in Part II. (Part I deals with the auxiliary notion of evidential…
"A Reinterpretation of "Degrees of Truth
On Prediction and Explanation
On the Logic of Existence and Denotation
JN RECENT philosophical discussion regarding the nature of the concept of existence and the logical theory of cognate concepts, the tendency has been to view these problems in their Kantian setting, by focussing upon the question Is 'exists' a predicate ? and the bearing which these considerations have upon the validity of the ontological argument.' Now it is, to be sure, inevitable that the logical theory of existence must in the last analysis r…
The Distinction between Predicate Intension and Extension
The Problem of a Logical Theory of Belief Statements
It is shown that the logical theory of belief statements must be prepared to take into account relationships among statements which are subtler and more delicate than is requisite in other contexts. It is necessary here to draw distinctions (of a modal and semantical character) which the standard assertory logic can ignore with impunity. This is due to the fact that it is entirely possible to be in ignorance of various logical relationships (eg.,…
A problem in the theory of numerical estimation
The Logic of Scientific Discovery
Philosophy and Argument
A Ninth-Century Arabic Logician on
Must identities be necessary
The Concept of Randomness
Though there be no such thing as chance in the world, our ignorance of the real causes of any event begets a like species of belief or opinion
Non-deductive rules of inference and problems in the analysis of inductive reasoning
Semantic Paradoxes and the Propositional Analysis of Indirect Discourse
The object of the present discussion is to show that the analysis of indirect discourse obtained when the concept of assertion is construed as a relationship that obtains between the asserting person and the asserted proposition—along the familiar lines proposed by Church [3, 4]—is entirely adequate of itself to circumvent the semantical paradoxes in which indirect discourse is involved
Belief-Contravening Suppositions
On the Logic of Presupposition
The Structure of Scientific Thought
The Problem of Uniqueness in History
The claim is frequently made that mode of explanation to be found in history differs radically and fundamentally from types of explanation found in natural or social sciences. This difference is said to lie in fact that history, unlike science, must always deal with the description of a situation or state of affairs which is unique.' It is argued that exclusive objects of historical understanding are unique, particular, concrete events: historian…
Philosophy (160 obras) · Epistemology (139 obras) · Computer Science (70 obras) · Classical Philosophy and Thought (45 obras) · Philosophy (38 obras) · History (27 obras) · Psychology (27 obras) · Mathematics (26 obras) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (23 obras) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (23 obras)