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Nicholas Rescher's interest in issues of social philosophy, now dating back over forty years, have resulted in four previous books: Distributive Justice (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1966), Welfare: the Social Issues on Philosophical Perspective (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), Public Concerns (Lanham, MI: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), and Fairness (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002). Additionally, however, he has during this time also written more than a dozen essays on various particular problems and issues of this domain-usually in response to the needs of...

The present book brings together several case studies, dealing with relevant facets of the work of some of philosophy's all-time greats. The subject-matter topic being addressed differs significantly, but in each case there is an attempt to apply mathematical methods and perspectives to the solution of a key philosophical issue in a way that throws instructive light upon it. On this basis it emerges that the question "Are mathematical methods useful in philosophy?" finds a suggestive response in the fact that over two millennia key figures in the history of the subject have indeed thought...

Human finitude and its implications have long been one of the central themes of Western philosophy. The essays gathered together in this volume explore various facets of this not altogether pleasing fact with which we must realistically come to terms.

set of studies of various ideas and theories that play a key role in contemporary idealism and are important for the pragmatic idealism that Nicholas Rescher long was developing.

For about a decade Nicholas Rescher directed the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Philosophy of Science and he has published instructive studies in this field since the 1950's. Some dozen of the contributions to the field are published in the present volume, and they combine to illustrate his characteristic approach of blending empirical data with philosophical theorizing.

While philosophers from Plato to Kant and beyond have discussed the mission and methodology of philosophy, this area of deliberation has only recently been acknowledged as a distinctive branch of philosophy as such, duly entitled metaphilosophy. There are, as yet, very few books on the subject so that the present volume joins a rather select group. Professor Rescher has published in the field for some thirty years and this book gathers together a representative sampling of his contributions. Taken together these pieces convey an instructive overview of the field, as well as vividly...

Since Rescher's earliest publication of the middle 1950's in this field, the philosophy of science has constituted one focus of his interest and preoccupation. Some dozen of Rescher's contributions to the field are published in the present volume, and they combine to convey his favored way of blending empirical data with philosophical theorizing.

For over thirty years Professor Rescher has been preoccupied with exploring the scope and limits of human knowledge from an array of different points of view. This book collects together these various threads into a unified treatment of this overall terrain. It argues in detail that while scepticism is about the prospect of factual knowledge about the world is emphatically unwarranted, nevertheless the project of amplifying this knowledge does encounter some specifiable and insuperable limits.

This book is avowedly written in what has been rather patronizingly called "the affable spirit of compromise or conciliation" between science and religion. Its key thesis is that these two enterprises can--and should be--seen as complementary in addressing different albeit interrelated questions: on the one side the nature of the natural world and our place in it, and on the other how we should proceed and act so as to capitalize on the opportunities that our place in the world affords to us for shaping our lives in a meaningful and satisfying way. How the world works is the crux of the...

The place of humans in nature's scheme of things and the conditions and circumstances of our existence have been at the forefront of philosophical deliberation since the very dawn of the subject. Over the past three decades Rescher from time to time ventured into discussions of some of the key themes that crop up in this domain. representative sampling of such papers are assembled in the present volume. He trust that this collection will give some indication of the tenor of thought that characterizes Rescher's approach to these philosophically crucial concerns.

No short book on the explanation of existence can afford the hubris of claiming to accomplish this task. And certainly no such claim can be or is being made here. What is at issue is not--and cannot be--an actual explanation. Rather, what is attempted here is at the very most a rough sketch of the conceptual architecture that an adequate explanation can be expected to exhibit. No more is achieved than a rough and general indication of the direction in which a satisfactory explanation can unfold. A vast amount of detail will have to be filled in to provide a tenable explanation. Only the...

On Certainty continues Rescher's longstanding practice of publishing occasional studies that form part of a wider program of investigation of the scope and limits of rational inquiry in the pursuit of understanding. And pragmatism forms a subtextual Leitmotiv of these essays, seeing that the linking idea at work throughout is that knowledge is a tool for the management of our theoretical and practical affairs, and that what we ask of it is serviceability for the uses we have in view.

During 2005-2006 I continued my longstanding practice of writing occasional studies on philosophical topics, both for formal presentation and for informal discussion with colleagues. While my forays of this kind have usually issued in journal publications, this has not been so in the preset case so that the studies offered here encompass substantially new material. Notwithstanding their thematic variation, they manifest a uniformity of treatment and method in a way that is characteristic of my philosophical modus operandi and inherent is its endeavors to treat classical issues from novel...

Since the late 1960's Professor Rescher has carried on a series of investigations in value theory in an endeavor to clarify the nature of values and the ways in which they impact on human affairs.

This book collects together some dozen of these studies in a way that showcases the author's characteristic perspective on this important range of basic philosophy issues. It bring clearly to view the author's characteristic combinations of analytical accuracies within a broad luminative outlook.

This book is the product of a collaboration stretching the years 2007-10, whose initial fruit was a paper on "Plenum Theory" published in Nous. The work grew out of the author's conviction that standard set theory, which had evolved to meet the needs of mathematics, was not fully adequate to the less abstractly geared and rigidly determine needs of less finalized ranges of inquiry and deliberation.