Philosophy / General

In this unique work Nicholas Rescher tackles the major questions of philosophical inquiry, pondering the nature of truth and existence.

In this highly accesible work, Rescher offers a realistic view of the nature and operation of luck to help us come to terms with life in a chaotic world.

Process philosophy views temporality, activity, and change as the cardinal factors in our understanding of the real, and emphasizes process over product. In this work Nicholas Rescher provides an accessible survey of the basic issues and controversies surrounding this philosophical approach.

Nicholas Rescher accompanies the text of the Monadology section-by-section with relevant excerpts from some of Leibniz’s widely scattered discussions of the matters at issue. The result serves a dual purpose of providing a commentary of the Monadology by Leibniz himself, while at the same time supplying an exposition of his philosophy using the Monadology as an outline.

“The work would be of great value to philosophers engaged in the conceptual analysis of coercion, to political scientists studying the state or other coercive institutions, and to advanced readers interested in the field of peace research.”—Choice

Rescher develops a theory that accounts for philosophical disagreement and shows how conflicts root in divergent ‘cognitive values’-values regarding matters such as importance, centrality, and priority. He argues that given the nature of the enterprise, consensus is not a realistic goal, and failure to achieve it is not a defect.

The four main essays in this volume investigate new sectors of the theory of decision, preference, act-characteristics, and action analysis. These are complemented by appendices on a study of the logic of norms by Alan Ross Anderson, and Rescher provides an outline of the aspects of action.

This volume offers an unusual variety of topics presented during the fifth annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. Essays topics include: a dispute of the standard deductivist account of scientific testability; two definitions of “nonsense” that are closely related and correlate to science’s concern with truth and philosophy’s concern with concepts; contesting the causes of voluntary actions purported in Hart and Honore’s Causation and the Law; distinguishing two kinds of metaphysical tasks-taxonomic and evaluative; and discussions of “what a thing is” in terms of its qualities and particulars and the distinction between numerical and conceptual differences, universals and individuation.

The fifteen papers in this volume deal with the two overlapping topics of knowledge and experience from the perspective of analytic philosophical inquiry. The topics addressed are prominent in the work of such modern philosophers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, C. I. Lewis, Gilbert Ryle, A. J. Ayer, and John L. Austin.

Nicholas Rescher presents the first translation of medieval Arabic philosopher al-Farabi’s “Short Commentary on Prior Analytics” in English, and supplements this with an informative introduction and numerous explanatory footnotes.