Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy- Dr. Nicholas Rescher
The Center of Philosophy of Science is very sad to report that Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, Dr. Nicholas Rescher, has passed away.
Professor Nick Rescher, former Center Director, and Center Chairman, leaves an outstanding body of philosophical work.
A lifelong student of the work of the philosopher Leibniz, Rescher is responsible for the rediscovery and restoration of Leibniz’s cipher machine, a contrivance some 250 years ahead of its time in capability.
To acknowledge extensive gifting and to recognize his fifty years of service to the institution, the University of Pittsburgh established in 2010 the substantial Nicholas Rescher Prize for Contributions to Systematic Philosophy.
Rescher earned his doctorate at Princeton in 1951 while still at the age of twenty-two–a record for Princeton’s Department of Philosophy. He had served as a President of the American Philosophical Association, of the American Catholic Philosophy Association, of the American G. W. Leibniz Society, of the C. S. Peirce Society, and of the American Metaphysical Society, as well as Secretary General of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Sciences. He was the founding editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he had been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain, the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Royal Society of Canada, the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, he has been awarded fellowships by the Ford, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundations. He was the recipient of eight honorary degrees from universities on three continents. He had been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, and the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007. In 2011, he was awarded the premier cross of the Order of Merit (Bundesdienstkreuz Erster Klasse) of the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition of contributions to philosophy. In 2016 the Germany Academy of Sciences (Berlin-Brandenburg) bestowed on Rescher the Helmholz Medal, its most distinguished academic award.
To learn more about his work, use the link below