In a career extending over almost six decades, Nicholas Rescher has conducted research in almost every area of philosophy. In this extraordinary volume, two dozen scholars offer penetrating discussions of various facets of Rescher's investigations. The result is an instructively critical panorama of the many-faceted contributions of this important American philosopher.

Born in Germany in 1928, Nicholas Rescher came to the U.S. at the age of nine. He is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he has also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department and as director (and currently chairman) of the Center for Philosophy of Science. In a productive research career extending over six decades, he established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style. His work represents a many-sided approach to fundamental philosophical issues that weaves together threads of thought from continental idealism and American pragmatism. Rescher has made specific contributions to logic, the history of logic, the theory of knowledge, and to the philosophy of science. Rescher has also worked in the area of futuristics, and along with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey is co-inaugurator of the so-called Delphi method of forecasting. Ten books about Rescher's philosophy have been published in four languages.

Rescher earned his doctorate at Princeton in 1951 at the age of twenty-two--a record for Princeton's Department of Philosophy. He has 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. He was the founder of the American Philosophical Quarterly. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Royal Society of Canada, the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated from English into other languages, he is the recipient of eight honorary degrees from universities on three continents, and winner of many international prizes.