Introduction to the Special Issue

Nicholas Rescher founded the American Philosophical Quarterly in 1964, followed by its sister journals the History of Philosophy Quarterly and Public Affairs Quarterly in the 1980s. At some point in his autobiography he praises intellectual initiative with the example of founding a major journal rather than waiting for one to be handed to one.Of course Rescher's accomplishments extend far beyond this journal. His prolific productivity is the stuff of legend. He is often said to have published more than one hundred books. The precise tally varies, but is undoubtedly well beyond that. A list up to 2010 counts more than 140, and some tallies approach 160. Rescher himself occasionally said, perhaps with more modesty than accuracy, that he had lost count. To some extent, and in a way appropriately reflective of some of his work, the matter may be indeterminate. Rescher's speculative reconstruction of Leibniz's cipher machine seems more like a pamphlet than a book. His Niagara-on-the-Lake as a Confederate Refuge seems entirely distinct from his philosophical work and is a mere forty pages long. And do the fourteen volumes of his collected papers form part of the count?Rescher's prolific output has also been a source of humor. It has been speculated that there is no Nicholas Rescher any more than there was a Nicolas Bourbaki: that in both cases the name represents not a single individual but is a collective pseudonym for the work of a committee. “Is Nicholas Rescher there?” asks a caller to the Department. “I'm sorry, but Professor Rescher is writing a new book.” “That's okay. I'll hold.”In the end, what is astounding about Rescher's work is not its extent in word count but its breadth and depth in content. If there is one characteristic that stands out in his writing, it is his ability to combine the innovations of formalism with a refreshing common sense. In my experience, his work always reflects deep thinking on the topic that stimulates the same depth of thinking in the reader. In terms of breadth, Robert Brandom has perhaps said it best: “There is no area of philosophy—from medieval Arabic to mathematical logic, through philosophy of science, to philosophy of mind, ethics and welfare economics—that he did not think hard about and make contributions to.”In this issue we collect a small handful of contributions on Rescher-related topics, in a number of cases by students and collaborators with prominent philosophical work of their own. Brian Skyrms begins the selection with decision-theoretic aspects of “The dates of Al Ghazari,” the formulation of a problem better known as Buridan's Ass. Bas van Fraassen's lecture for this year's Rescher Medal is included as our second piece, with new work on the logic of Moore's paradox, drawing from and reinforcing both Moore and Wittgenstein's view of the paradox. Samuel C. Wheeler III unveils an exciting new semantics for comparative predicates and quantifiers inspired by Rescher's work on “most” in the 1960s. Daniel Bonevac outlines Rescher's mix of realism, idealism, and pragmatism as an exploration of the human attempt to model “An Unfathomable World.” Robert Audi plumbs the different aspects of Rescher's approach to intuitions; Ernest Sosa and Noah Lemos offer very different explorations of Rescher on common sense. Joshua L. Golding offer a strengthening of Pascal's Wager that reflects Rescher's treatment, and Tom Vinci appeals to Rescher's metaphysical optimality in exploring theories intelligent design. We close with personal reminiscences of Nick.Born in 1928 in Germany, christened as Klaus Helmut Erwin Rescher, he became Nicholas only at the age of ten on immigration with his parents to America. His father had been a lawyer, unsympathetic to the Nazis; with the Nazification of the judicial system he started losing both cases and clients. On immigration his father started a small photography business in Flushing, but again the times were against him. As America entered World War II, a national security measure prohibited “enemy aliens” within 300 miles of the coast from owning cameras.In 1944 Nicholas became an American citizen. By 1946 he was studying mathematics and philosophy at Queens College in New York, a student of Carl Hempel. Through that link he was admitted to a number of graduate programs in both mathematics and philosophy, but chose Princeton. It was there that he worked with W. T. Stace and Alonzo Church, met Moore and Urmson as Princeton visitors, and through contact and collaboration with Paul Oppenheim—again though Carl Hempel—met Russell, Reichbach, and other notables. He developed the core of what became his dissertation on Leibniz early in his graduate career, giving him a “running start” that allowed him to earn his Ph.D. in two years, at the departmental record age of twenty-two.Rescher was drafted into the Marine Corps. A plan that would have had him work with John von Neumann fell through; he ended up teaching calculus during the Korean War. Rescher went from there to the mathematics division at the RAND corporation. He was somewhat defensive later in life regarding the military implications of his work—including calculations of the consequences of nuclear war. But it was there that he was first exposed to futurology and collaborated in the development of the DELPHI method. During that time he also met Rudolph Carnap and joined him at his house for discussions of probability and induction.In 1957 Rescher returned to formal academia as an assistant professor at Lehigh University, where standard teaching and academic duties allowed him far more freedom than RAND's eight-hour days. It was at Lehigh that he met Adolf Grünbaum, who was invited in 1960 to start a philosophy department at the University of Pittsburgh virtually from scratch. The first member he brought in was Nicholas Rescher; together they recruited Kurt Baier as a third. The companion departments of philosophy and of history and philosophy of science are now consistently ranked in the very top tier world-wide. Rescher spent the next sixty years at Pitt, serving as department chair and as director and chair of the Center for Philosophy of Science. Quite characteristically, he made himself available for teaching anything the department asked of him. Across town, he collaborated with Herbert Simon at Carnegie Mellon on issues of causality and counterfactuals.Rescher also served as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, the Leibniz Society, the Charles S. Peirce Society, and the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Through teaching and friendship with R. M. Hare he became an honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he and his wife often spent summers. He was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europoea, the Royal Society of Canada, and the Institut International de Philosophie, and was awarded the Humbolt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship, the Aquinas medal from the American Catholic Society, the Helmholz medal of the German Academy of Sciences, and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He received eight honorary degrees on three continents. The University of Pittsburgh created the Nicholas Rescher Medal for Contributions to Systematic Philosophy in 2010, followed by the American Philosophical Association and the Nicholas Rescher prize in 2018.In his 60s, Rescher added Spanish to his other languages in order to lecture in Spain. In his 80s he took up bridge, reaching the level of a National American Bridge Championship Master. Rescher worked well into his mid-nineties, writing always in longhand (and straining limits of legibility) with transcriptions by his long-time assistant Estelle Burris. His decline came quickly after the death of his beloved wife Dorothy.

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