PROBLEM: THE BEING OF NONEXISTENTS. In matters of irreality, medieval philosophers were not much concerned with fiction as such. The prime focus of their attention was theology, and their dealings with nonexistence related to the role of such items in relation to the thoughts of God rather than those of man. In this light, the medievals approached the issue of nonexistents on essentially the following basis.

The increasingly lively controversy over scientific realism has become one of the principal themes of recent philosophy. 1 In watching this controversy unfold in the rather technical way currently in vogue, it has seemed to me that it would be useful to view these contemporary disputes against the background of such older epistemological issues as fallibilism, scepticism, relativism, and the traditional realism/idealism debate. This, then, is the object of the present book, which will recon sider the newer concerns about scientific (...) realism in the context of these older philosophical themes. Historically, realism concerns itself with the real existence of things that do not "meet the eye" - with suprasensible entities that lie beyond the reach of human perception. In medieval times, discussions about realism focused upon universals. Recognizing that there are physical objects such as cats and triangular objects and red tomatoes, the medievels debated whether such "abstract objects" as cathood and triangularity and redness also exist by way of having a reality indepen dent of the concretely real things that exhibit them. Three fundamen tally different positions were defended: (1) Nominalism. Abstracta have no independent existence as such: they only "exist" in and through the objects that exhibit them. Only particulars (individual substances) exist. Abstract "objects" are existents in name only, mere thought fictions by whose means we address concrete particular things. (2) Realism. Abstracta have an independent existence as such. (shrink)

Nicholas Rescher presents a critical reaction against two currently influential tendencies of thought. On the one hand, he rejects the facile relativism that pervades contemporary social and academic life. On the other hand, he opposes the rationalism inherent in neo-contractarian theory--both in the idealized communicative-contract version promoted in continental European political philosophy by J;urgen Habermas, and in the idealized social contract version of the theory of political justice promoted in the Anglo-American context by John Rawls. Against such tendencies, (...) Rescher's pluralist approach takes a more realistic and pragmatic line, eschewing the convenient recourse of idealization in cognitive and practical matters. Instead of a utopianism that looks to a uniquely perfect order that would prevail under ideal conditions, he advocates incremental improvements within the framework of arrangements that none of us will deem perfect but that all of us "can live with." Such an approach replaces the yearning for an unattainable consensus with the institution of pragmatic arrangements in which the community will acquiesce--not through agreeing on their optimality, but through a shared recognition among the dissonant parties that the available options are even worse. (shrink)

During 2007/2008 Nicholas Rescher continued his longstanding practice of writing occasional studies on philosophical topics, both for formal presentation and for informal discussion with colleagues. While his forays of this kind have usually been issued in journal publications, this has not been so in the present case so that the studies offered here encompass substantially new material. Notwithstanding their thematic variation, these exemplify a problem-oriented method in the treatment of philosophical issues that is characteristic of Rescher's philosophical (...) modus operandi and inherent in its endeavors to treat classical issues from novel points of view. For Rescher usually more concerned with what should be said about a philosophical question than with what X, Y, and Z have said about it, and he inclined to address issues of the latter sort primarily as a means for addressing the former."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

No descriptive material is available for this title.

Plena are large-scale macro-totalities appropriate to the realms of all facts, all truths, and all things. Our attempt here is to take some first technical steps toward an adequate conception of plena.

This book is a survey of key issues in the theory of evaluation aimed at exhibiting and clarifying the rational nature of the thought-procedures involved. By means of theoretical analysis and explanatory case studies, this volume shows how evaluation is-or should be-a rational procedure directed at appropriate objectives. Above all, it maintains the objectivity of rational evaluation.

The essays collected in this volume have a strong thematic and interpretative unity. Their underlying concern is with the overall nature of Kant's philosophical system, and thus with his deepest intentions and basic commitments. The book falls into three parts. The first three essays deal with Kant's approach to things in themselves and with the realm of noumenal causality. The second part considers Kant's approach to the methodology of rational inquiry, and, in particular, his views on cognitive systematization and the (...) limits of philosophizing itself. The third section focuses on the role played by the categorical imperative in both the theoretical and practical philosophy. The aim throughout, one that many Kant scholars and students will find provocative, is to show that in an important sense Kant is prepared to assert the primacy of practical over theoretical philosophy. (shrink)

During the years 800-1200 A.D., Arabic scholars studied many of the works of Greek philosophy, and recorded their interpretations. Significant Arabic interpretations of Aristotle's Prior Analytics, the key work of his logical Organon, however, have remained largely unavailable in the West. The recent discovery of several Arabic manuscripts in Istanbul revealed the “Short Commentary on Prior Analytics” by the medieval Arabic philosopher al-Farabi. Nicholas Rescher here presents the first translation of this work in English, and supplements this with (...) an informative introduction and numerous explanatory footnotes. (shrink)

In theory and practice, the notion of fairness is far from simple. The principle is often elusive and subject to confusion, even in institutions of law, usage, and custom. In Fairness, Nicholas Rescher aims to liberate this concept from misunderstandings by showing how its definitive characteristics prevent it from being absorbed by such related conceptions as paternalistic benevolence, radical egalitarianism, and social harmonization. Rescher demonstrates that equality before the state is an instrument of justice, not of social (...) utility or public welfare, and argues that the notion of fairness stops well short of a literal egalitarianism. Rescher disposes of the confusions arising from economists' penchant to focus on individual preferences, from decision theorists' concern for averting envy, and from political theorists' sympathy for egalitarianism. In their place he shows how the idea of distributive equity forms the core of the concept of fairness in matters of distributive justice. The coordination of shares with valid claims is the crux of the concept of fairness. In Rescher's view, this means that the pursuit of fairness requires objective rather than subjective evaluation of the goods being shared. This is something quite different from subjective equity based on the personal evaluation of goods by those laying claim to them. Insofar as subjective equity is a concern, the appropriate procedure for its realization is a process of maximum value distribution. Further, Rescher demonstrates that in matters of distributive justice, the distinction between new ownership and preexisting ownership is pivotal and calls for proceeding on very different principles depending on the case. How one should proceed depends on context, and what is adjudged fair is pragmatic, in that there are different requirements for effectiveness in achieving the aims and purposes of the sort of distribution that is intended. Rescher concludes that fairness is a fundamentally ethical concept. Its distinctive modus operandi contrasts sharply with the aims of paternalism, preference-maximizing, or economic advantage. Fairness will be of interest to philosophers, economists, and political scientists. "[Fairness is] one of the most forceful conceptual analysis of fairness yet produced." -Ludwig Beckman, The Review of Metaphysics Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy and vice chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written more than seventy books in various areas of philosophy, including Complexity: A Philosophical Overview and Inquiry Dynamics, both published by Transaction. (shrink)

Bacon's inductivist philosophy of science divides thinkers into the scientific and the prejudiced, using as a standard the up-to-date science textbook. Inductivists regard the history of science as progressing smoothly, from facts rather than from problems, to increasingly general theories, undisturbed by contending scientific schools. Conventionalists regard theories as pigeonholes for classifying facts; history of science is the development of increasingly simple theories, neither true nor false. Conventionalism is useless for reconstructing and weighing conflicts between schools, and overemphasizes science's internal (...) organic growth. For Popper, not for inductivists or conventionalists, the successful criticism of theories is the heart of science. Popper's view admits the existence of valuable errors and enables us to avoid being wise after the event, thereby improving our understanding of the history of science through reconstructions of the actual interplay of theories and facts. (shrink)

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.1 This paper greatly impressed me—and I was not alone. We have here one of those unusual publications that sets the agenda for (...) a whole generation of investigators. It set in train an enormous body of discussions and publications which shaped the course of deliberations about scientific explanation over the next decades—an effort to which my own work also made some contributions. However my present aim is not to consider what came out of the Hempel-Oppenheim paper but what went into it. I want, in sum, to consider the prehistory of that era of scientific explanation studies—and to look more closely at the background ramifications of this paper that launched a thousand others. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 58-77.

Nicholas Rescher examines the controversial social issue of the welfare state, and offers philosophical thoughts on the limits and liabilities of government and society. Questioning some of the principal assumptions of democratic theory and classical liberalism, Rescher theorizes that the current system is not a be-all end-all, but rather a necessity with limited scope that will ultimately fail to achieve its objectives. He further purports that the welfare state must be a transitional phase to a more affluent (...) postindustrial society-a satisfying life, rather than an adequate one. (shrink)

The article urges a negative answer to the question if values merely lie ‘‘in the eyes of the beholder’’. It argues the objectivity of values via their status as tertiary properties that are neither on dispositionally inherent in their objects nor yet affective (dispositionally evoked in the interaction between objects and sense–observers), but rather reflective in being dispositionally evoked in suitably competent minds considering the matters involved.

tational background of dialectic: the structure of formal disputation. Formal disputation Perhaps the clearest, and surely historically the most prominent, ...

Presents a synoptic, compact, and accessible exposition of this influential and interesting sector of twentieth-century American philosophy.

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-contravening supposition. Then the causal ordering is used to provide modal (...) categories for the factual propositions, and the logical contradiction in the system is resolved by ordering the factual propositions according to these causal categories. (shrink)

Presumption is a remarkably versatile and pervasively useful resource. Firmly grounded in the law of evidence from its origins in classical antiquity, it made its way in the days of medieval scholasticism into the theory and practice of disputation and debate. Subsequently, it extended its reach to play an increasingly significant role in the philosophical theory of knowledge. It has thus come to represent a region where lawyers, debaters, and philosophers can all find some common around. In Presumption and the (...) Practices of Tentative Cognition, Nicholas Rescher endeavors to show that the process of presumption plays a role of virtually indispensable utility in matters of rational inquiry and communication. The origins of presumption may lie in law, but its importance is reinforced by its service to the theory of information management and philosophy. (shrink)

Contending that only a normative theory of rationality can be adequate to the complexities of the subject, this book explains and defends the view that rationality consists of the intelligent pursuit of appropriate objectives. Rescher considers the mechanics, rationale, and rewards of reason, and argues that social scientists who want to present a theory of rationality while avoiding the vexing complexities of normative deliberations must amend their perspective of the rational enterprise.

An esteemed American philosopher reflects on the nature of luck and its historical role in war, business, lotteries, and romance, and delineates the differences ...