Career
Rescher immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1938 at the age of nine. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps during 1952-54, and during 1954-56 worked in the Mathematics Division of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1951, the youngest person—22 at the time—ever to do so in that department.
During his formative years, Rescher was a student of Carl Gustav Hempel in philosophy of science, of Alonzo Church in logic, Walter Terence Stace in metaphysics, and of Banesh Hoffmann in differential geometry. In 1957-59 Rescher studied Arabic with S.D. Goiten at the University of Pennsylvania, and over the next four years he issued various publications about medieval Arabic Logic.
Rescher arrived at the University of Pittsburgh in 1961 where has been a faculty member ever since. He is a former chair of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Philosophy and currently co-chairs the Center for Philosophy of Science with the status of Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy. Having begun his teaching career with a preceptorship at Princeton in 1960, he continues to be active in this role.
He is among the most prolific of contemporary scholars, having written about 400 articles and 100 books, ranging over many areas of philosophy. Works by Rescher have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Japanese. Rescher serves on the editorial board of some dozen academic professional publications, including Process Studies, the principal academic journal for process philosophy and theology. Some dozen books about Rescher’s work have appeared in English, German, and Italian and Arabic. For over three decades Rescher served as editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly.
He has lectured at universities in many countries, and has held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg. He has held fellowships from the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. A former president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, of the Metaphysical Society of America, of the C. S. Peirce Society, and of the G. W. Leibniz Society of America. Rescher has also served as member of the Board of Directors of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies, an organ of UNESCO. His contributions to philosophy have been recognized by honorary degrees awarded by eight universities on three continents.
He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Cardinal Mercier Prize for International Philosophy in 2005, and the American Catholic Philosophical Society's Aquinas medal in 2007. In response to his substantial gift to its philosophy archive, the University of Pittsburgh established in 2010 a biennial Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy, to honor an internationally acknowledged contribution with a gold medal and an award of $25,000.
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 and is also a member of the Academia Europaea and of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2011 the German Federal Republic awarded Rescher its premier Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz Erster Klasse) for his services to philosophy and to German-American collaboration in the field.
In 1968 Rescher married Dorothy Henle and they have three children, Mark (b. 1969), Owen (b. 1970), and Catherine (b. 1975). By an earlier marriage he also has a daughter Elizabeth (b. 1960). His life is detailed in an Autobiography (Frankfurt: ONTOS, 2007). He is a cousin of the eminent orientalist Oskar Rescher.
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