Nicholas Rescher

  • Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy [Secondary appointment in HPS]

NICHOLAS RESCHER (Ph.D., Princeton, 1951) is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and has also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department and a Director (and currently Chairman) of the Center for Philosophy of Science. In a productive research career extending over six decades he has more than one hundred books to this credit. Fourteen books about Rescher's philosophy have been published in five languages. He has served as a President of the American Philosophical Association, of the American Catholic Philosophy Association, of the American G. W. Leibniz Society, of the C. S. Peirce Society, and of the American Metaphysical Society as well as Secretary General of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Sciences. Rescher has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europea, the Royal Society of Canada, and the Royal Historic Society of Great Britain. He has been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, and the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007. In 2011 he was awarded the premier cross of the Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz Erster Klasse) of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2011, and in 2016 received the Helmholtz Medal of the German Academy of Sciences (Berlin-Brandenburg.)

Representative Publications

  • KANT AND THE REACH OF REASON, Cambridge University Press, 1999. 
  • NATURE AND UNDERSTANDING: A STUDY OF THE METAPHYSICS OF SCIENCE, Clarendon Press, 2000.
  • PARADOXES: THEIR ROOTS, RANGE, AND RESOLUTION, Open Court, 2001. 
  • PHILOSOPHICAL REASONING, Blackwell, 2001. 
  • EPISTEMOLOGY: ON THE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE, SUNY Press, 2003. 
  • ON LEIBNIZ, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. 
  • FREE WILL, Transaction Books, 2009.
  • INFINITE REGRESS, Transaction Books, 2010.
  • AXIOGENESIS, Lexington Books, 2013.
  • THE PRAGMATIC VISION, Rowman & Littlefield 2013.
  • CONCEPT AUDITS, Lexington Books, 2017.