by Michele Marsonet.

Nicholas Rescher was born on 15 July 1928 in the German town of Hagen, Westphalia, and died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, on 5 January 2024. His family moved to the United States in 1938 for political reasons. In fact the father, Erwin Hans Rescher, was not sympathetic to National Socialism. Rescher’s university education took place first at Queens College, in New York, and then at Princeton. At Queens College, attended in the period 1946-1949, he met teachers such as Herbert G. Bohnert (a disciple of Rudolf Carnap), the young Donald Davidson then beginning his academic career, and Carl Gustav Hempel, himself a German immigrant. Rescher studied mathematics and philosophy. Subsequently, from 1949-1952, he was a graduate student at Princeton’s Philosophy Department. There Alonzo Church was one of his teachers, and his logic courses strengthened Rescher’s interest in this field. In 1952 the Ph.D. work was completed.
Following the military service he spent some years at the Rand Corporation in California, and his academic career began in 1957 at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, where Rescher taught philosophy undergraduate courses up to 1961. In that setting he met for the first time Adolf Grünbaum. At Lehigh Rescher laid the foundations of his first well known published works, concerning the history of Arabic logic. In 1960 Grünbaum, who held the Andrew Mellon chair in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, helped him to become, in May 1961, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has been ever since. Grünbaum and Rescher formed the nucleus of a Philosophy Department which was soon to became world famous, including such figures as Kurt Baier, Alan R. Anderson, Nuel D. Belnap and Wilfrid Sellars.
Since then Rescher’s work was identified with that of the Philosophy Department of the University of Pittsburgh. In 1964 he founded the American Philosophical Quarterly (of which he served as editor up to the end of 1993), and later on the History of Philosophy Quarterly. Subsequently he served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department and as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science, established in 1960. Outside Pittsburgh, Rescher was awarded honorary degrees from Lehigh University, from the Loyola University of Chicago and from the Argentina National Autonomous University of Cordoba, while in 1977 he was elected an honorary member of Corpus Christi College in Oxford.
In order to understand Rescher’s thought we must remember that Leibniz has always been his favorite philosopher because – as our author often notes – of Leibniz’s many-sidedness and his ability in utilizing logic and mathematics towards philosophical ends. This differentiates Rescher from Dewey and other pragmatist thinkers, who deem symbolic tools useless. He is not an adherent of Leibniz’s doctrine, but of his mode of philosophizing. In this sense he views the German philosopher as “the” master in the use of the formal resources of symbolic thought in the interest of the clarification and resolution of philosophical issues.
It should be noted that Rescher received a typical analytic training, with teachers like Hempel and Church leaning towards the logical empiricist brand of the analytic tradition. On the other hand, already at the beginning of his career he tended to see formal logic not as an objective per se, but rather as an instrument for pursuing larger, philosophical purposes.
In the beginning of his career Rescher laid the foundations of his first well known published works, all of them concerning the history of Arabic logic and philosophy. With the passing of time, however, his interests shifted from logic and analytic philosophy of science to epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and a philosophy of science conceived in much broader terms; ultimately his work has been largely devoted to issues pertaining to social philosophy, political philosophy and metaphilosophy. It should not be forgotten, however, that contrary to the tendencies dominating American contemporary thought, Rescher always maintained a constant interest in the history of philosophy. This is how he describes his broad vision of the philosophical work: “The period after the First World War had seen the diffusion of a more and more narrowly constricted view of the task of philosophy […] The spread of the logical positivist ideology so trenchantly articulated in A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic typifies the culmination of this narrowing of views. Though I myself was largely reared in the ethos of this perspective, it gradually dawned on me that the mission of those of us who began to be active in philosophy after World War II was to reverse this impoverishment of our subject by the inter-war generation. Our task – as I saw it – was to work for a widened conception of the field, to effect broader synthesis, and to restore active concern for the historic problems of the traditional range of philosophical deliberation. We were to restore a concern for wholeness and system – not by abandoning the penchant for exactness and detail of the pre-war generation, but by fusing details into meaningful structures […] Those who followed in the footsteps of Moore and Russell and Carnap often lost sight of the real problems – as these masters never did. I viewed this tendency with increasing distaste, and felt that while detailed technical studies were indeed indispensable, their utility was purely instrumental, and lay wholly in their bearing on the large traditional issues of the field.” (“Curriculum Operis”, In: A. Mercier, M. Svilar (eds), Philosophers on Their Own Work, Vol. 9, Frankfurt am Main: 1982, pp. 199-236).
Today pragmatism is currently gaining new strength in the American philosophical circles. As a matter of fact, however, the contemporary neopragmatism actually thriving in the United States has a largely Rortyan flavor, while Putnam’s rediscovery of William James’s philosophy and of pragmatism in general is rather recent, and the comments on it are still scanty. Rescher’s pragmatist stance is less well known than Rorty’s even though it is older, the reason being that Rescher’s thought is essentially perceived as a form of idealism. His American colleagues seem to believe that Rescher’s conceptual idealism is more important than his methodological pragmatism, while neither may they be distinguished by a neat border-line, nor can any of the two deemed to be more important than the other. Rescher’s philosophy is a sort of holistic system.
Rescher draws a distinction between a more flexible “pragmatism of the left” and a more conservative “pragmatism of the right.” He notes that there seem to be as many pragmatisms as pragmatists. Usually, however, those who are interested in pragmatism from an historical point of view tend to forget that a substantial polarity is present in this tradition of thought. It is a dichotomy between what Rescher calls “pragmatism of the left,” which endorses a greatly enhanced cognitive relativism, and a “pragmatism of the right,” namely a different position that sees the pragmatist stance as a source of cognitive security. Both positions are eager to assure pluralism in the cognitive enterprise and in the concrete conduct of human affairs, but the meaning they attribute to the term “pluralism” is not the same. Rescher sees Charles S. Peirce, Clarence I. Lewis and himself as adherents to the pragmatism of the right, or objective pragmatism, and William James, F.S.C. Schiller and Richard Rorty as representatives of the pragmatism of the left, or subjective pragmatism. Objective pragmatism is based on what works impersonally for the realization of some objective purpose, in an impersonal way. In Rescher’s view pragmatism, thus, is essentially a venture in validating objective standards.
But what does the “pragmatism of the right” really come to? Parochial diversity is something that a post-modern pragmatist like Richard Rorty gladly accepts in order to achieve results which are, at the same time, subjectivistic and relativistic. On the other hand, even Rescher sees practical efficacy as the cornerstone of our endeavors, but at the same time he takes efficacy to be the best instrument we have at our disposal for achieving objectivity.
The social world that men themselves create requests that we constantly live having some purposes in mind, and objective pragmatism is just concerned with the effective and efficient achievement of purpose (what works). However, the purposes that Rescher talks about are not mine, or yours: they are not, in a word, correlated to the particular tastes of individuals or particular social groups. They can be rather taken to be all collective human endeavors whose rational roots are ultimately reducible to the nature of human condition as such. This means that all men qua men happen to share a natural environment to which they give order resorting to their rational-intellectual capacities. Of course the largely autonomous social world assumes different shapes according to the different cultural traditions; but, still, we are somewhat compelled to assume a broad “principle of correspondence,” according to which human purposes match the inputs that are set by the conditions of homo sapiens, as biological evolution on this planet and social evolution in our cultural environment have shaped us.
So Rescher’s kind of pragmatism leads to objectivity, in the sense that objective constraint, and not personal preference, is the fundamental premise of our cognitive goals. What we mean to achieve in starting the process of empirical knowledge is control over the natural environment of which we are ourselves essential part, and this control, in turn, may be both active (interactionistic) and passive (predictive). Although he openly declares his idealistic stance, Rescher recognizes the presence of a “reality principle” that is practically forced upon us just in view of our belonging in the natural world, and despite the fact that we play, in that same world, a very special role (quite different, that is, from the role played by stones, stars or animals). Our control over nature, in turn, can never be total. We create the social-linguistic world, but not natural reality. It must be admitted that we have access to natural reality only through social and linguistic tools, but it is fallacious to draw, from this premise, the conclusion that men create the whole of reality, both social and natural.
If we accept this line of reasoning, any clear border-line between the social and the natural world is illusory. We can in other words claim that nature imposes inescapable constraints upon us; but, at the same time, we are allowed to stress the fact that men always see nature from their point of view, this being their condition of “accessibility” to nature itself. However, there is no need to conceive of this condition in purely individualistic and solipsistic terms: it rather pertains to the human species at large.
We all know that different human groups categorize reality in different ways, even though these differences are never so great as to prevent a reasonably good communication among them. So we are bound to ask: How are these communal projects set up, given the inevitable difference among the many groups that actually form humankind? Can we really find a common basis which is shared by all human beings as such, so preventing the risk that talk about communal projects is just wishful thinking?
According to Rescher we certainly can, and the basic reason relies on the view of human social life as a rational reaction of self-adaptation to the natural environment from which social groups themselves evolved. Thus, objective pragmatism claims that (a) our social-linguistic world evolved out of natural reality; (b) this social-linguistic world acquires an increasing autonomy; (c) between the social and the natural worlds there is no ontological line of separation, but just a functional one; (d) however, the accessibility to natural reality is only granted by the tools that the social-linguistic world provides us with; (e) this means that our knowledge of natural reality is always tentative and mediated by our conceptual capacities; (f) there is no need to draw relativistic conclusions from this situation, because the presence of “an objective reality that underlies the data at hand” puts upon personal desires objective constraints that we are able to overcome at the verbal level, but not in the sphere of rational deliberations implementing actions.
Rescher never tires of stressing that the conceptual apparatus we employ itself makes a creative contribution to our view of the world, and his holistic (or systemic) stance is clearly influenced by Hegel and Bradley. It should be noted that Rescher immediately tied these idealistic insights to the philosophy of science, a sector that has always been at the core of his interests. The aforementioned statements, in fact, led him to the conclusion that scientific discovery, Galileo notwithstanding, is not a matter of simply “reading” what is written in the book of nature, but is rather the outcome of a process we have already mentioned several times: the interaction between nature on the one side, and human mind on the other. The contribution that mind gives to the construction of “our science” is at least as important as that provided by nature: no science – as we know it – would be possible without the specific contribution of the mind.
Rescher in the early 1970’s launched his project of rehabilitating idealism. In particular, a conceptual idealism maintaining that we standardly understand the real in somehow mind-invoking terms of reference is perfectly compatible with an ontological materialism, that holds that the human mind and its operations ultimately root (be it causally or superveniently) in the machinations of physical process. On the one hand Rescher accepts the Kantian view that our knowledge is strongly determined by the a priori elements present in our conceptual schemes, and that they indeed have an essential function as long as our interpretation of reality is at stake. On the other hand, however, he tends to see these aprioristic elements as resting on a contingent basis, and validated on pragmatic considerations.
The mind certainly makes a great contribution towards shaping reality-as-we-see-it, but the very presence of the mind itself can be explained by adopting an evolutionary point of view. There is no neat distinction between ontology and epistemology in Rescher’s works. He refuses to draw a clear border line between the two, and one of the reasons for that lies in the aforementioned holistic character of his philosophical system. The separation between factual and conceptual (synthetic/analytic) is not sharp and clean, but rather fuzzy. Yet there is another reason, which is connected to the ontological opacity of the real world. we can have access to the unconceptualized world only through conceptualization. And conceptualizaton is, in turn, the key feature that characterizes our cultural evolution.
For understanding the real historical development of analytic philosophy, it is necessary to take into account the idealistic formation of some of its forerunners (and of Bertrand Russell in particular). Russell, along with George E. Moore, was largely influenced in his youth by Bradley and other representatives of British idealism. But this idealistic background continued somehow to be present in the analytic tradition, even though, in most cases, it was carefully hidden. Rescher, in the Preface of his book Conceptual Idealism, writes that he endeavors to defend a form of idealism of the Hegelian type in the tradition of Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, Royce, McTaggart, and Blanshard, despite the facile dismissal of idealism that has become standard in Anglo-American philosophy.
The early analytic philosophy put forward various realistic theses that were directly opposite to the idealistic ones. For instance, the world, which was clearly mind-dependent for Bradley and the other British neoidealists, was instead seen as mind-independent by Russell and Moore; furthermore, reality, which was essentially one for the neoidealists, was conceived as formed by a multitude of separate objects by the new analytic thinkers. Rescher’s sympathy for idealism grew constantly, following the attendance of a graduate seminar on Bradley’s Appearance and Reality taught by Walter T. Stace in Princeton. This explains why Rescher endorses a coherentist approach to truth. He cites Bradley’s contention that “Truth to be true must be true of something, and this something itself is not truth.” Accepting the suggestions of an idealist like Ewing, we might even say that correspondence and coherence theories are not such traditional enemies as the philosophical tradition usually depicts them to be. Rescher’s coherence theory implements Bradley’s dictum that system (i.e., systematicity) provides a test criterion most appropriately fitted to serve as arbiter of truth.
The idealistic component of Rescher’s thought should not be overestimated, but just given its proper weight within his philosophical system taken as a whole. No one can seriously doubt that there are strong idealistic features in his philosophy. For example, he never tires of stressing that the conceptual apparatus we employ itself makes a creative contribution to our view of the world, and his holistic (or systemic, if you prefer) stance is clearly influenced by Hegel and Bradley, i.e. thinkers who have long been quite unpopular within American philosophy. But idealism is just one element in a broader framework where pragmatism plays the key role, and other important components are detectable as well in his thought.
Rescher never diminishes the importance of biological evolution, which is specifically geared to the natural world and, after all, is supposed to precede our cultural development from the chronological point of view. The fact is, however, that it is cultural evolution that distinguishes us from all other living beings that happen to share our planet with us. Just for this reason Rescher claims that idealism, broadly speaking, is the doctrine that reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind-coordinated. However, his specifically conceptual idealism stands in contrast to an ontological doctrine to the effect that mind somehow constitutes or produces the world’s material. Scientists, thus, will not find in his philosophy the basic anti-scientific attitude endorsed by the classical idealists and some contemporary neo-idealist thinkers, who deem natural science unimportant because it deals with a second-level reality, i.e., with a reality that is “secondary”, being merely a creation of the human (or divine) mind (or spirit).
Now, if we admit that the real (i.e. mind-independent) world exists, a distinction may be drawn between: (A) Nature-as-we-understand-it, and (B) Nature itself. Is this distinction ontological or epistemological? To answer this question, we should be able to trace a line of separation between ontology and epistemology neater than the one Rescher is inclined to accept. Rescher’s suggestion, however, would be that our conceptual machinery is at work even when we try to gain access to (B) because our access to the world is always mind-involving. Going back to the aforementioned distinction between (A) and (B), it might even be said that it is a real distinction, because we know that our history is both biological and cultural, although our cultural life needs a preexistent biological basis in order to develop. However, not much can be said about (B).
By using our scientific instruments and theories we are able to shed some light on the natural history of the earth (and of the universe at large), but this natural history is always ours, because it is conducted by following our mental patterns and categories and by using the scientific instruments and theories that we build. We can push our sight so far as to imagine an era when no categorization of the world took place because no men were around. Still, even in this case we must have recourse to categorization just to imagine a situation of this kind (which can be presumed to have been real because, after all, evolutionary epistemology gives good reasons for assuming that humankind was not present on our planet since the beginning). Any “absolutely objective” ontology is then left in the background, because precious little can be known about it and it represents a via negativa that does not take us very far.
What can we possibly think about this reality, and how can we say what it is like? Even for imagining a world totally devoid of human presence, we must use human concepts. As we said previously, conceptualization is not an optional we can get rid of, but a built-in component of our nature of human beings. According to our author, then, we must distinguish between the that and the what of this purported mind/thought independent reality. In this case, we are sensibly entitled to claim that it exists, while simply rejecting the challenge to specify what it is like. Going back to the example of science, we know for sure that there are errors in present-day science, but cannot say what they are. Rescher’s conception of scientific realism is thus strictly tied to his distinction between reality-as-such and reality-as-we-think-of-it. He argues that there is indeed little justification for believing that our present-day natural science describes the world as it really is, and this fact does not allow us to endorse an absolute and unconditioned scientic realism. In other words, if we claim that the theoretical entities of current science correctly pick up the “furniture of the world,” we run into the inevitable risk of hypostatizing something – i.e. our present science – which is only an historically contingent product of humankind, valid in this particular period of its cultural evolution.
As for political and ethical issues, if we want to be pluralists in the true spirit of Western democratic thought, we must abandon the quest for a monolithic and rational order, together with the purpose of maximizing the number of people who approve what the government, say, does. On the contrary, we should have in mind an acquiescence-seeking society where the goal is that of minimizing the number of people who strongly disapprove of what is being done. We should never forget, in fact, that the idea that all should think alike is both dangerous and anti-democratic, as history shows with plenty of pertinent examples. Since consensus is an absolute unlikely to be achieved in concrete life, a difference must be drawn between “being desirable” and “being essential.” It can be said that it qualifies at most for the former status. The general conclusion is that consensus is no more than one positive factor that has to be weighed on the scale along with many others.
It is worth stressing the similarity between Rescher’s epistemology and political/ethical philosophy: they both rest on his skepticism about idealization. In neither case we can get perfect solutions to our problems, short of supposing an – actually unattainable – idealization. We have to be fallibilists in epistemology because we are emplaced in suboptimal conditions, where our knowledge is not (and cannot be either) perfected. In other words, we have to be realistic and settle for imperfect estimates (that is, the best we can obtain).
Since we cannot realize a Habermas-style idealized consensus, we must settle for what people will go along with, i.e. “acquiesce in.” This may not be exactly what most or many of us would ideally like but, in any case, if we insist on “perfection or nothing,” we shall get either nothing or a situation very far away from our ideal standards. In the socio-political context, “realism” means settling for the least of the evils because, as history teaches, disaster will follow if we take the line that only perfection is good enough.
According to Rescher, the overcoming of analytic philosophy’s ill-based foundationalism means neither the end of philosophy itself, nor the refusal to recognize its cognitive value. He agrees with Rorty’s assertion that philosophers cannot detach themselves from history or forsake the everyday and scientific conceptions that provide the stage setting of their discipline. But, nevertheless, he claims that the dissolution of philosophy is a deeply wrong answer. Skeptics of all sorts would like to liberate humankind from the need of doing philosophy, pointing out that it has thus far been unable to answer our questions in a proper way. Rescher, to the contrary, invites us to take sides because abandoning philosophical subjects is a leap into nothingness. Of course we can escape into the history of philosophy conceived of in merely philological terms, or into technical minutiae, but this is tantamount to cognitive vacuity. The need to philosophize stems from our very nature of inquiring beings, and is built in the cultural evolutionary heritage that we all share.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Development of Arabic Logic (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh: 1964).
Many-Valued Logic (McGraw Hill, New York: 1969).
Conceptual Idealism (Blackwell, Oxford: 1973).
The Coherence Theory of Truth (Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1973).
Methodological Pragmatism (Blackwell, Oxford: 1977).
Scientific Progress (Blackwell, Oxford: 1978).
Induction (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh: 1980).
The Limits of Science (University of California Press, Berkeley: 1984).
The Strife of Systems (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh: 1985).
Scientific Realism (Reidel, Dordrecht: 1987).
Ethical Idealism (University of California Press, Berkeley: 1987).
A System of Pragmatic Idealism (3 vol., University of Princeton Press, Princeton: 1992-94).
Pluralism (Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1993).
Philosophical Standardism (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh: 1994).
Process Metaphysics (University of New York Press, Albany: 1996).
Realistic Pragmatism (University of New York Press, Albany: 2000).