In a career extending over almost six decades, Nicholas Rescher has conducted researches in almost every principal area of philosophy, historical and systematic alike. In this extraordinary volume, two dozen scholars join in offering penetrating discussions of various facets of Rescher s investigations. The result is an instructively critical panorama of the many-faceted contributions of this important American philosopher. Born in Germany in 1928, Nicholas Rescher came to the U.S. at the age of nine. He is University Professor of Philosophy (...) at the University of Pittsburgh where he has also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department and as director (and currently chairman) of the Center for Philosophy of Science. In a productive research career extending over six decades, he has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style. His work represents a many-sided approach to fundamental philosophical issues that weaves together threads of thought from continental idealism and American pragmatism. And apart from this larger program Rescher has made various specific contributions to logic (the conception autodescriptive systems of many-sided logic), the history of logic (the medieval Arabic theory of modal syllogistic), to the theory of knowledge (epistemetrics as a quantitative approach in theoretical epistemology), and to the philosophy of science (the theory of a logarithmic retardation of scientific progress). Rescher has also worked in the area of futuristics, and along with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey is co-inaugurator of the so-called Delphi method of forecasting. Ten books about Rescher s philosophy have been published in four languages. Rescher earned his doctorate at Princeton in 1951 while still at the age of twenty-two a record for Princeton s Department of Philosophy. 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. He was the founder of the American Philosophical Quarterly. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Royal Society of Canada, the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, he has been awarded fellowships by the Ford, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundations. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated from English into other languages, he is the recipient of eight honorary degrees from universities on three continents. He was 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.". (shrink)

Blind Realism originated in the deeply felt conviction that the widespread acceptance of Gettier-type counterexamples to the classical definition of knowledge rests in a demonstrably erroneous understanding of the nature of human knowledge. In seeking to defend that conviction, Robert F. Almeder offers a fairly detailed and systematic picture of the nature and limits of human factual knowledge.

Blind Realism originated in the deeply felt conviction that the widespread acceptance of Gettier-type counterexamples to the classical definition of knowledge rests in a demonstrably erroneous understanding of the nature of human knowledge. In seeking to defend that conviction, Robert F. Almeder offers a fairly detailed and systematic picture of the nature and limits of human factual knowledge.

As an introduction to explicating the concept of basic knowledge, I shall examine Aristotle's argument for the existence of basic knowledge and urge two basic points. The first point is that Aristotle's argument, properly viewed, establishes the existence of a kind of knowledge, basic or non-demonstrative knowledge, the definition of which does not require the specification of, and hence the satisfaction of,anyevidence condition. This point has been urged by philosophers like Peirce and Austin but it needs further argumentation because most (...) analytic epistemologists still insist thatallknowledge, whether basic or non-basic, requires the satisfaction of some evidence condition. Secondly, to urge that the basic propositions whose existence is established by Aristotle's argument could be privileged but not known, for the reason that there is no evidence condition for them, would be to adopt a position that either entails wholesale skepticism or undermines the basic distinction between knowledge and belief. (shrink)

In a style that is both philosophically sophisticated and accessible to general readers, Robert Almeder introduces readers to the vigorous debate in the scientific community about the possibility of personal survival after death. He argues that belief in some form of personal survival is as empirically justifiable as our belief in the past existence of dinosaurs. Drawing on 21 of the best case studies in reincarnation, apparitions of the dead, ostensible possession, out-of-body experiences, and trance mediumships, Death and (...) Personal Survival offers a comprehensive discussion of the best empirical evidence in each of these areas and refutes alternative explanations offered by sceptics. (shrink)

In Human Happiness and Morality, noted philosopher Robert Almeder provides lucid introductory explanations of the major ethical theories and traditions, as well as a clear and comprehensive discussion of the proposed answers to three basic questions in ethics: What makes a right act right? Why should I be moral? What is human happiness and how can I attain it? He then ventures beyond the basic questions, describing the relationship between morality and happiness; clearly defining human happiness; and raising (...) the question of whether happiness, so defined, is the likely product of a life lived morally. In the final chapter, Almeder details simple Stoic rules for happy living and shows how it is possible to live the good life despite the existence of unhappiness and failure in others. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Le doute en question: Parades pragmatistes au défi sceptiqueRobert AlmederClaudine Tiercelin Le doute en question: Parades pragmatistes au défi sceptique (Doubt in Question: Pragmatist Responses to the Challenge of Skepticism) Paris & Tel-Aviv: Editions de l'eclat, 2005. 332 pp.This book is a serious contribution to the highest standards of scholarship along with a masterful ability to re-deploy the results of that contribution in a striking display of philosophical (...) acumen aimed at showing us how to set aside that vast body of contemporary literature devoted to taking seriously the challenge of contemporary skepticism in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. It is not enough to say that this is an excellent book. Those who think that philosophy done well is a commanding esthetic experience will find Tiercelin's book a work of high art performed and executed with style, deep analytic insight, and grace.The author, who teaches American Philosophy, Contemporary Epistemology and Philosophy of Language at the University of Paris, is an outstanding scholar and an incisive philosopher. She is pre-eminently equipped to elucidate and advance philosophical discourse by carefully applying the best of pragmatic thought to enduring epistemological, metaphysical and ethical problems associated with strong global skepticism. She has a sensitive and broad command of the critical texts, and shows us why the usual objections to pragmatic epistemology, for example, are, in spite of continuing popularity, unacceptable in the light of those texts. She guides us back to Peirce's doubt-belief theory of inquiry and argues carefully not only that the purpose of all inquiry is to establish reliable beliefs that allow us to adapt successfully to the myriad demands of an independent world, but also that our explication of the nature of truth and knowledge must be made consistent with that fundamental point. That in itself would be enough for [End Page 282] a fine book. But she then goes further to delineate how pragmatic thought can be redeployed to discover the inadequacy of several responses to contemporary arguments for skepticism (including the argument from ignorance) and at the same time show how those very pragmatic theses deserve a place of honor in virtue of their demonstrable power to dissolve or undermine the main arguments for the skeptic's general story.After an introductory section outlining the new rise and nature of contemporary skepticism with its roots in ancient and modern philosophy, the book divides nicely into seven sections bearing the following titles:1. The nature and impact of the skeptical challenge in contemporary philosophy2. To what extent can we doubt?3. Two pragmatic strategies in the face of doubt: Peirce and Wittgenstein4. Pragmatism or the human logic of truth5. The ethical response to the skeptical challenge;6. Do we perceive the external world? and7. The risk of error and the presumption of knowledge.In the introduction and in the first two sections, Tiercelin shows in detail the continuity between the contemporary resurgence in skeptical thought affirming that knowledge that P requires the elimination of every possibility of error, and the Cartesian thesis to the effect that as long as one can imagine any universe of discourse in which one might be mistaken for any reason in what one believes, one's belief is not an item of knowledge. But, for Tiercelin, while knowledge may be a form of justified true belief, justification sufficient for knowledge simply does not require freedom from the logical possibility of error. Later, in the conclusion of the book (p. 253) she returns to this same issue and notes that, along with many others, even the late David Lewis accepted the unfortunate Cartesian thesis when he asserted in "Elusive Knowledge" (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74.4 [1996]: 549ff) that there is something fundamentally contradictory with sentences such as "I know that P, but I may be mistaken". After all, so the Lewis story goes, if you know that P, there can be no sense in which what you know could be mistaken. At any rate, in the first two sections, Tiercelin delineates different kinds of doubt, and argues from a Peircean perspective on the nature and origin of real doubt... (shrink)

After delineating the distinguishing features of pragmatism, and noting the resources that pragmatists have available to respond effectively as pragmatists to the two major objections to pragmatism, I examine and critically evaluate the various proposals that pragmatists have offered as a solution to the problem of induction, followed by a discussion of the pragmatic positions on the status of theoretical entities. Thereafter I discuss the pragmatic posture toward the nature of explanation in science. I conclude that pragmatism has (a) a (...) generally compelling solution to Hume's problem of induction; (b) no specific position on the status of theoretical entities, although something like the non-realism of the sort developed by van Fraassen seems a defensible candidate for most pragmatists in general, even though there are non-trivial objections to van Fraassen's position; and (c) central to the pragmatic conception of scientific explanation is the abandonment of our common conception of truth as a necessary condition for sentences to provide adequate explanations, and a drift in the direction of a contextualist account of explanation. (shrink)

In this paper i show that no fewer than thirteen distinct interpretations of peirce's views on truth exist in the literature, that most are the product of sloppy scholarship, that the standard view is wrong, and that the only two plausible views are offered by n rescher and david savan respectively. whether the correct view of what peirce argued is defensible is not examined.

Robert Almeder provides a comprehensive discussion and definitive refutation of our common conception of truth as a necessary condition for knowledge of the world, and to defend in detail an epistemic conception of truth without falling into the usual epistemological relativism or classical idealism in which all properties of the world turn out to be linguistic in nature and origin. There is no other book available that clearly and thoroughly defends the case for an epistemic conception of truth (...) and also claims success in avoiding idealism or epistemological relativism. (shrink)

In this essay we defend the view that from a purely rule-utilitarian perspective there is no sound argument favoring the immorality of hostile liquidating buyouts. All arguments favoring such a view are seriously flawed. Moreover, there are some good argument favoring the view that such buyouts may be morally obligatory from the rule-utilitarian perspective. We also defend the view that most of the shark repellents in the market are immoral. If we are right in our arguments there is no justification, (...) moral or otherwise, for any form of legislation that would constrain the practice of hostile liquidating buyouts. (shrink)

More often than not, the attractive features of Peirce's theory of meaning have been overlooked because of the temptation on the part of many philosophers to dismiss Peirce as a beknighted forerunner of a narrow form of verificationism frequently identified with the view of the ...

In this essay it is argued that (1) if the process of scientific inquiry were to continue foreever, then science would ultimately terminate in the acceptance of a single theoretical framework better than all conceivable others, and (2) there is some evidence in favor of the view that science will continue unto eternity but no evidence in favor of the contrary view. In arguing for claim (1) it is claimed that if we are to understand the sense in which science (...) is progressive we must mean either that science progresses by approximating a final goal which, given an infinite process, will be attained, or that science progresses simply in the sense of expanding a body of funded knowledge such that, given an infinite process, the body of funded knowledge expands ad infinitum. That the second member of this disjunct is false and that the first cannot be shown to be false follows largely from a discussion and rejection of all available arguments (five) against the hypothesis proposed in (1). Further, an argument provided by Peirce (and suitably supplemented) provides additional positive evidence for the truth of the first member. No such argument exists for the truth of the second member. In arguing for claim (2) it is held that evidence in favor of a belief can be purchased by the positive moral value likely to occur as a result of accepting the beliefs, and that there is at least one moral value which accrues to the belief that inquiry will continue forever but which does not accrue to the belief that inquiry will not continue forever. In short, while there is no systematic evidence for or against the view that inquiry will continue forever, we have the right (and duty) to believe that inquiry will continue forever but we do not have the right (and duty) to believe the contrary. (shrink)

I argue that (1) if scientific progress, construed in revolutionary terms, were to continue indefinitely long, then any non-trivial question answerable by the use of the scientific method would in fact be answered in a way that would allow for further refinement without undermining the essential correctness of the answer; and (2) it is reasonable to believe that scientific progress will continue indefinitely long. The establishment of (1) and (2) entails that any non-trivial empirically answerable question will be answered in (...) a way that allows for further indefinite refinement.Moreover, inasmuch as the establishment of (1) and (2) undermines the ontological relativity inherent in the commonly held view that unto eternity there will be competing alternative scientific theories of differing ontological commitment, it provides for the ontologically and epistemologically privileged position of science. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to hoffman's piece "almeder on truth and evidence" ("philosophical quarterly", Volume 25, January 1975). In "truth and evidence" ("philosophical quarterly", Volume 24, October 1974) I had argued that gettier-Type counterexamples to the classical definition of knowledge as completely justified true belief are defective because they assume the false proposition that a person can be completely justified in believing a false proposition. Hoffman objected to my reasons for saying as much and in this paper I (...) reply to his objections. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the naturalism of Carnap and Quine. I examine Quine's naturalized epistemology and argue that Carnap's naturalism is considerably more attractive.

In this paper I examine the claim that no theory of\nepistemic justification is possible because whatever\ndefinition one gives admits of the question "Are you\njustified in accepting your definition of justification?"\nwhich cannot be answered without begging the question in\nfavor of the original definition offered. I examine various\nreplies to the argument and then argue that the question\nneed not be answered.