N Rescher: 6 books

This volume collects together eleven essays in epistemology, written during the past three years. They are mostly unpublished, just four of them having appeared previously (numbers two, three, four and eleven). Detailed acknowledgement of prior publication is made in the notes to the relevant chapters....

Leibniz said with a mixture of admiration and inspiration that the Duchess Sophie of Hannover always wanted to know the reason why behind the reason why. And that is just how rationality works: it wants to leave no loose ends to understanding, seeking to enable us to understand things through to the...

The essays included in this volume are a mixture of old and new. Three of them make their first appearance in print on this occa­ sion (Nos III, IV, and V). The remaining four are based upon materials previously published in learned journals or anthologies. (However, these previously published papers...

The aim of this monograph is to expound the conceptions of temporalized modality at issue in various Arabic logical texts. I claim to have been able to make good logical sense of doctrines of which even the later Arab logicians themselves came to despair. In the process, a substantially new area of...

The increasingly lively controversy over scientific realism has become one of the principal themes of recent philosophy. 1 In watching this controversy unfold in the rather technical way currently in vogue, it has seemed to me that it would be useful to view these contemporary disputes against the...

Philosophy is shaped by life and life is shaped by philosophy. This is reflected in The Philosophical I, a collection of 16 autobiographical essays by prominent philosophers. Candid and philosophically insightful, these personal narratives critically call into question the belief that philosophy should...