Knowledge at the Boundaries

NICHOLAS RESCHER is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. In a productive research career extending over six decades he has well over one hundred books to this credit and fourteen books about Rescher's philosophy have been published in five languages. He has served as a President of: the American Philosophical Association, the American Catholic Philosophy Association, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, the C. S. Peirce Society, and 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 Asiatic Society of Great Britain. He has been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007, the Founder's Medal of the Metaphysical Society of America in 2016, and the Helmholtz Medal of the Germany Academy of Sciences (Berlin/Brandenburg) in 2016. In 2011 he was awarded the premier cross of the Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz Erster Klasse) of the Federal Republic of Germany, and honorary degrees have been awarded to him by eight universities on three continents. In 2010 the University of Pittsburgh honored him with the inauguration of a biennial Rescher Medal for distinguished lifetime contributions to systematic philosophy, and in 2018 the American Philosophical Association launched a Rescher Prize with a similar objective.

Chapter 1. Default Reasoning.- Chapter 2. Vagueness: a Variant Approach.- Chapter 3. Conceivability.- Chapter 4. Issues of Identity and Identification.- Chapter 5. On Explanation and Understanding.- Chapter 6. Alethic Topology (a Study in Topological Semantics and Paradox).- Chapter 7. The Logic of Knowledge Distribution.- Chapter 8. Relevance and its Problems.- Chapter 9. Leibniz and "the liar".- Chapter 10. Did Leibniz Anticipate Gödel.- Chapter 11. Reification Fallacies and Inappropriate Totalities.- Chapter 12. Mind Questions.- Chapter 13. Intuition and Mathematical Idealism.- Chapter 14. Outlandish Hypotheses and the Limits of Thought Experimentation.- Chapter 15. Limitations and the World Beyond (Co-authored with Patrick Grim).- Chapter 16. Philosophical Confrontations.- Chapter 17. The Limits of Philosophy.- Chapter 18. The Rational Inescapability of Philosophizing.- Chapter 19. Antiphilosophy.