Instructive Journey: An Essay in Autobiography

Overview

Nicholas Rescher was born in Germany in 1928 and came to the USA at the age of ten. He attended Queens College in New York City and Princeton University, where he earned his Ph.D. while still twenty-two. Since 1961 he has been University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he has also served as Chairman of the Department of Philosophy and as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. The author of more than seventy books in various areas of philosophy, works by Mr. Rescher have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Japanese. One of the few contemporary exponents of philosophical idealism, Mr. Rescher has been active in the rehabilitation on the coherence theory of truth and in the reconstruction of philosophical pragmatism in line with the idealistic tradition. He has pioneered the development of inconsistency-tolerant logics and, in the philosophy of science, the exponential retardation theory of scientific progress based on the epistemological principle that knowledge increases merely with the logarithm of the increase in information. Books about Rescher's work have appeared in English, German, and Italian. His contributions to philosophy have been recognized repeatedly by honorary degrees awarded by universities in the U.S.A. and abroad. In 1977 its fellow elected him an honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and in 1983 he received an Alexander von Humboldt Humanities Prize, awarded under the auspices of the Federal Republic of Germany "in recognition of the research accomplishments of humanistic scholars of international distinction." In this autobiographical work, Rescher describes his boyhood in Nazi Germany,his family's struggles to make a new life for themselves in the USA of the 1930's, and the vicissitudes attending his own labors as a professional philosopher. The book provides a vivid and humane portrait of the intellectual and personal formation of America's most productive philosophical author.

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