Nicholas Rescher

Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz

G.W. Leibniz's Monadology, one of the most important pieces of the Leibniz corpus, is at once one of the great classics of modern philosophy and one of its most puzzling productions. Because the essay is written in so condensed and compact a fashion, for almost three centuries it has baffled and beguiled those who read it for the first time. Nicholas Rescher accompanies the text of the Monadology section-by-section with relevant excerpts from some of Leibniz's widely scattered discussions of the matters at issue. The result serves a dual purpose of providing a commentary of the Monadology by Leibniz himself, while at the same time supplying an exposition of his philosophy using the Monadology as an outline. The book contains all of the materials that even the most careful study of this could text could require: a detailed overview of the philosophical background of the work and of its bibliographic ramifications; a presentation of the original French text together with a new, closely faithful English translation; a selection of other relevant Leibniz texts; and a detailed commentary. Rescher also provides a survey of Leibniz's use of analogies and three separate indices of key terms and expressions, Leibniz's French terminology, and citations. Rescher's edition of the Monadology presents Leibniz's ideas faithfully, accurately, and accessibly, making it especially valuable to scholars and students alike.

An Edition for Students

G.W. Leibniz's Monadology

101 Anekdotta Felsefe Tarihinde Yolculuk

Presents a synoptic, compact, and accessible exposition of this influential and interesting sector of twentieth-century American philosophy.

An Introduction to Process Philosophy

Process Metaphysics

This volume examines the future prospects for research in the natural sciences and provides reasons for the cost-escalation of scientific work.

A Philosophical Essay on the Economics of Research in Natural Science

Scientific Progress

Introduction to Value Theory

Rescher defines an apory as a group of individually plausible but collectively incompatible theses. Citing thinkers from the pre-Socratics through Spinoza, Hegel, and Nicolai Hartmann, he builds a framework for coping with the complexities of divergent theses, and shows in detail how aporetic analysis can be applied to a variety of fields including philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, logic, and intellectual history.

Rational Deliberation in the Face of Inconsistency

Aporetics

Process Philosophy surveys the basic issues and controversies surrounding the philosophical approach known as “process philosophy.” Process philosophy views temporality, activity, and change as the cardinal factors for our understanding of the real—process has priority over product, both ontologically and epistemically. Rescher examines the movement's historical origins, reflecting a major line of thought in the work of such philosophers as Heracleitus, Leibniz, Bergson, Peirce, William James, and especially A. N. Whitehead.

A Survey of Basic Issues

Process Philosophy

This book brings together several case studies, dealing with relevant facets of the work of some of philosophy's all-time greats. The subject-matter being addressed differs significantly, but in each case there is an attempt to apply mathematical methods and perspectives to the solution of a key philosophical issue in a way that throws instructive light upon it. On this basis, it emerges that the question "Are mathematical methods useful in philosophy?" finds a suggestive response in the fact that over two millennia, key figures in the history of the subject have indeed thought so. And they have substantiated this view not so much by abstract argumentation on the basis of general principles, but by making this point through actual practice.

Studies in Quantitative Philosophizing

Presumption is a remarkably versatile and pervasively useful resource. Firmly grounded in the law of evidence from its origins in classical antiquity, it made its way in the days of medieval scholasticism into the theory and practice of disputation and debate. Subsequently, it extended its reach to play an increasingly significant role in the philosophical theory of knowledge. It has thus come to represent a region where lawyers, debaters, and philosophers can all find some common around. In Presumption and the Practices of Tentative Cognition, Nicholas Rescher endeavors to show that the process of presumption plays a role of virtually indispensable utility in matters of rational inquiry and communication. The origins of presumption may lie in law, but its importance is reinforced by its service to the theory of information management and philosophy.

Presumption and the Practices of Tentative Cognition

This volume is a reassessment of free will and, as such, seeks to answer the question: Do humans ever act under the guidance of the will? To determine if humans have free will, Rescher first examines what exactly free will is and how it should function. While the literature on the subject of free will is vast, a good deal still remains to be done to avert obscurity and confusion. Rescher leads the reader through a conceptual web of distinctions that, taken together, provide a satisfying contribution to philosophical thought on free will in general. Rescher sharpens his highly conceptual assessment by making distinctions--between productive (or metaphysical) and moral (or motivational) freedom, free decision and free action, motivational and causal determination of choices, durational events and the instantaneous eventuations that mark their commencements and completions, and between pre-determination and precedence determination. In doing so, he also examines the role of nature, nurture, and free choice. Each of these distinctions defines the characteristics of free will and averts a group of problems and difficulties traditionally ascribed to the doctrine. With these in place, it becomes possible to validate the compatibility between freedom of the will and a certain special mode of determinism. Rescher's conceptual perspective in this age-old debate opens up the prospect of naturalizing free volition through its natural emergence via the same process of evoking development that has seen the emergence of intelligence on the world's stage. That is, only after the conceptual issues are settled, can the question of how things actually stand be answered. This work will be an important reassessment of free will not just because of the author's final conclusion, but because of the issue-illuminating path he takes to get there.

A Philosophical Reappraisal

Free Will

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Provides a study of the text including a detailed overview of the philosophical background of the work and its bibliographic ramifications; a presentation of the original French text together with a new English translation; a selection of other relevant Leibniz texts; and a detailed commentary.

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Alasdair Urquhart

This book is an introduction to temporal logic, a now flourishing branch of philosophical logic whose origin is of recent date, its main impetus having been provided by the publication in the late 1950s of A. N. PRIOR'S pioneering book, Time and Modality (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1957). Virtually all work in the field to around 1966 is surveyed in PRIOR'S elegant treatise Past, Present and Future (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1967). In consequence, it is no simple matter to write a comprehensive book on the subject with out merely rehearsing material already dealt with in PRIOR'S works. We believe, however, that the present book succeeds in this difficult endeavor because it approaches established materials from wholly novel points of departure, and is thus able to attain new perspectives and achieve new results. Its introductory character notwithstanding, the present work is consequently in substantial measure devoted to an exposition of new findings and a demonstration of new results. Parts of the book have been published previously. Chapter II is a modified version of an article of the same title by N. RESCHER and JAMES GARSON in The Journal of Symbolic Logic (vol. 33 [1968], pp.537-548). And Chapter XIII is a modified version of the article "Temporally Conditioned Descriptions" by N. RESCHER and JOHN ROBISON in Ratio, vol. 8 (1966), pp. 46-54. The authors are grateful to Professors GARSON and ROBISON, and to the editors of the jounal involved, for their permission to use this materials here.

Temporal Logic

This series provides a forum for monographs and collected volumes aiming at a philosophical discussion of the texts, topics, and arguments of ancient philosophers. The authors demonstrate that philosophical historiography not only paraphrases the claims of ancient authors, but can also reconstruct the arguments for those claims and consider ongoing discussions in modern philosophy, thus enriching the philosophical debate of our time.

Studies in Greek Philosophy

Cosmos and Logos

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Ethical Idealism

Studies in metaphilosophy

This is a collection of essays in the history of philosophy, ranging from the cosmic evolution in Anaximander, through Leibniz on creation, to the present state of American philosophy.

Essays in the History of Philosophy

A comprehensive introduction to the theory of knowledge.

An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge

Epistemology

Nicholas Rescher examines a number of controversial social issues using the intellectual tools of the philosopher, in an attempt to clarify some of the complexities of modern society, technology, and economics. He elucidates his thoughts on topics such as: whether technological progress leads to greater happiness; environmental problems; endangered species, costly scientific research on the frontiers of knowledge, medical/moral issues on the preservation of life; and crime and justice, among others.

Nicholas Rescher

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