an interview with nicholas rescher

18 Kinesis Volume 31 Number 2 19

Interview with Nicholas Rescher

Charles A. HobbsSouthern Illinois University Carbondale

Nicholas Rescher is a remarkably prolific American philosopher whose overall position is encapsulated in his trilogy A System of Pragmatic Idealism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992-1993). Born in 1928, in Hagen, Germany, Rescher and his immediate family relocated to the United States in 1938, and he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944. Rescher earned his bachelors degree (majoring in mathematics and philosophy) at Queens College and his doctoral degree in philosophy at Princeton University. He taught at Princeton, then at Lehigh University, and since 1961 he has been a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to service in the U.S. Marine Corps and with the RAND Corporation, Rescher has served as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, president of the Metaphysical Society of America, president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, president of the American G.W. Leibniz Society, and president of the C.S. Peirce Society. In a great number of articles and books, he has dealt with theoretical and historical aspects of a variety of philosophical topics, including medieval Arabic logic, the philosophy of Leibniz, luck, philosophy of science, pluralism, pragmatism, predicting the future, process metaphysics, risk, and some issues of social justice. Furthermore, Rescher founded, and has served as editor of, the American Philosophical Quarterly, History of Philosophy Quarterly, and Public Affairs Quarterly. He has also served as Director of the Center for the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. With the help of my colleague and friend Clifford Lee (of the philosophy department at Duquesne University), I interviewed Rescher during the morning and afternoon of Friday, October 29, 2004. This took place first at Rescher’s office in the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, and we then concluded the interview over lunch at a nearby diner. I thank Professor


Rescher for his generosity in granting us a significant amount of his time (as well as for buying us lunch!). I also thank Clifford for his invaluable assistance (especially with the operation of the recording equipment). Finally, I thank Christina Gould (editor of Kinesis, 2004-2005) for encouraging me to move forward with actualizing my idea of conducting this interview for publication in Kinesis. What follows is an abridged version of the interview. Those interested in examining the complete transcript should feel free to contact me at [email protected] or through the Department of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. Charles A. HobbsSouthern Illinois University-Carbondale

HOBBS: What was your first exposure to philosophy?

RESCHER: I think my very first exposure to philosophy was a book by a man called Will Durant, who ultimately wound up writing a long sort of history of the world, an intellectual history of the world in many volumes, but, at an earlier point in his career, he wrote a book called The Story of Philosophy, and that was a very popular account of some major episodes in the history of philosophy. I think it must have even made the best-seller list. It was very, very popular when it came out in the thirties. When I was in high school, my father gave me a copy of that book. I read it and was really fascinated by it and thought this would be a neat thing to do, to learn more about philosophy.

On the other hand, I was in those days very attracted to mathematics, and all through my college years I couldn’t make up my mind whether I wanted to study philosophy or to study math. So I carried a major in each, and when I was graduating I couldn’t make up my mind whether I wanted to go on in philosophy or math. So I applied to some graduate schools in the one and to some in the other, and, in philosophy, I got scholarship offers from Harvard and from Princeton. Now, in this era, just after World War II, Harvard was still – and I guess it’s always been – a philosophical powerhouse, whereas Princeton had fallen on rather


sad days. It was sort of a low point in Princeton’s philosophical development, but Princeton had an awfully good math department, and it was really in math a major powerhouse. So, I kind of split things down the middle. I went to Princeton to study philosophy, but sat in on an awful lot of courses in math and so took advantage of the mathematicians there.

HOBBS: Who were some of the teachers and professors that had a significant impact on you as a student?

RESCHER: As an undergraduate, I went to Queens College in New York. It’s now part of the City University. In those days, it was an independent, littlish college. It had an absolutely outstanding faculty, including a fair number of émigré European scholars who were delighted to find academic posts anywhere in this country, and the man, the teacher – I say “man” because actually the entire philosophy faculty of Queens College in those days, as indeed was the case with most universities, consisted of males – very few females – well in various parts of higher education of course there were females, but in philosophy and in math and science there were very few. So, anyway, okay, a man called Hempel, Carl G. Hempel, was one of the German émigré scholars who was at Queens, who then went on to Yale and Princeton, and I took every course that he offered, and he was a major source of inspiration to me for philosophical things. When I got to Princeton – as I said, it was a low point – Hempel’s coming there about three years after I left was the beginning of the rise of Princeton to philosophical distinction, but he hadn’t come yet, though fortunately I had him early on.

Princeton was something of a philosophical desert. I know that’s putting it much too strongly, but it wasn’t what it could be, should be, and has become, but there was one very interesting professor there, a man called Walter Terence Stace. Walter Terence Stace was an oddity, an Englishman who had studied in Scotland, and he’d gotten his degree somewhere around the time of the first world war in Edinburgh, and then, as was the case still in the old system with many British academics who’d been humanists of one


sort or another, he took the civil service exam, and the civil service exam in those days was like an exam in the humanities really, but it was also treated very hierarchically. People at the top of it went into the treasury and the people sort of at the next level went into the foreign office. Stace did well but not that well, and he went into the colonial civil service and went to Ceylon, and had spent a career of twenty-five years or so in the British civil service in Ceylon, rising ultimately to the august position of mayor of Columbo, now and then the capital of Ceylon. When he was finishing his civil service career, he decided he would go back into his original field. He’d been trained in philosophy and had actually written a book, published around 1918, 1920, something like that, on Hegel. I wish I could tell of Stace the story I told of Sterling who wrote a book called The Secret of Hegel, and the general remark on that was the secret of Hegel was well kept by Sterling, but Stace’s book was just called Hegel. It was a pretty good introduction to Hegel, although, by the time I knew him, whenever you asked him about it, he would tell you that it had been written by another person, because it was written by the “he” of thirty years ago, but, anyway, he was very interesting. He applied for this post at Princeton. Princeton had a very Anglophone, a very English friendly tradition in philosophy, especially with sympathies for the Scottish people, because McCosh, who was the person who started the Princeton philosophy department and then became president of Princeton, was a Scottish philosopher. Anyway, Stace was very interesting, and I would say that, of the people that taught me as a graduate student, he made more of an impact on me in terms of somebody who was able to do interesting and creative things in philosophy.

HOBBS: Who are your main philosophical influences, and, in general, how do you characterize the nature of the philosophical enterprise? RESCHER: I think every philosopher probably has a big figure in the history of philosophy around which they sort of focus their attachment to the subject and is for them the big hero. For me, that happens to be Leibniz. I did my Princeton doctoral dissertation


on Leibniz, and I’ve always been interested in him, not because the philosophical system that he created is something that I see as necessarily the way to go in the resolution of philosophical issues. It’s not so much an attachment to Leibniz’s doctrines as to the way in which he did philosophy and the spirit in which he carried on the pursuit of his philosophical work – the idea of treating the whole of learning as one unit and not seeing anything as irrelevant, but building, using the science of the day and the learning of the day as material for grist of the mill for the design of philosophical positions. I think that’s a very fruitful and interesting way to go and that one has to have this kind of breadth of sympathy and concern for what’s going on in other branches of the intellectual landscape in doing one’s philosophical work, and down to the present day Leibniz is sort of a big star on the philosophical firmament as I see it, and I’ve kept on doing various and sundry bits and pieces of work with him.

HOBBS: What makes you an idealist? RESCHER: I’m only an idealist in the sense that I’m allowed to design my own type of idealism. There are very, very different ways of being an idealist, I think, and in many of these ways I would not describe myself as an idealist, but in some I would. I’m certainly not an idealist in the Berkeleyan sense of thinking that minds, in their contexts and operations, are all that they are, but I am an idealist. I call it a conceptual idealism in the sense that – and it’s almost a trivial point of view – the only access way we have to coming to grips with the world’s realities is via the intellectual resources that we create for handling these things, and that while the realm of the ideal is not coordinate with the realm of the existent, nevertheless the way in which we grasp the existent and the way in which we can form our views about the nature of reality, has to proceed via cognitive, mental, ideational, conceptual resources that we create for handling that material so that it isn’t that thought is about things that are mentalistic in nature, but rather that the way in which thought proceeds is through the utilization of mind-provided materials. It isn’t that mind creates reality,


but that the mind-devised resources that we put to work are the instrumentalities through which our view of reality and its nature get processed, and that endows in many respects – there are lots of parts to this argument – in many respects endows reality with a kind of mentalistic cast. My sort of paradigm illustration of this is the idea of a book. Obviously books can exist in mind-denuded worlds. You could think of hypothetical worlds, possible worlds – in language, people like to do this – in which there are books and no people, but you can’t emplace in such a world something on this order [Rescher points at a book], which is obviously a book, but in a way to be a book is to be a kind of object that conveys information, that has text and pictures of diagrams. That is, the very explanation of what a book is can only be given in terms of reference that involve minds, because you need minds to characterize the doing of the kind of thing that makes the physical object into a book, and that’s what I mean by the conceptual sort of mind involvement of ideational material in the world. So, we couldn’t characterize things as we do without oblique reference to minds, because the terms of reference in which we carry out that characterization are terms of reference which can only be explained, explicated, and clarified with reference to minds. So, that’s roughly what I mean by conceptual idealism.

Minds get in through the back door. Even our description of physical nature, through identification of objects and so on, involves, obliquely, mentalistic operations. Again, for example, I can’t identify something as simply “this,” right, because that goes back to the idea that the fundamental ambiguity of ostension. You don’t know whether by “this” I mean, you know, this whole complex that exists between the book and the table on which it’s on, the book, the cover of the book, this part of the cover, this color, right? In order to identify something ostensively, I have to have a descriptive qualifier, but descriptive descriptions and characterizations and classifications, and all these kinds of things are ways of addressing, directing the attention of the mind to a certain category or type of stuff, and you can only do sort of classifying and descriptions in context when you can perform mental kinds of operations. So, anyway, okay, maybe I’ve gone off


too long here, but it’s because I see the conceptual handle we have on things as crucial, can see minds as the only players on the scene that can operate with concepts, that I have this conceptual idealist vision.

HOBBS: In short, what makes you a pragmatist?

RESCHER: I said before that there were many ways of being an idealist. I also think that there are many ways of being a pragmatist, and, I think, the major figures in the history of pragmatism, Peirce and Dewey, down to the present era – Rorty, James, in between – have very different visions of pragmatism and what the pragmatic program is about. My vision is much more Peirceian than Deweyan or any of the other kinds of things, although I like Dewey’s term “instrumentalism,” because I think that carries the right kind of connotation.

One way of being a pragmatist is to say that it almost goes back to the ancient academic skeptics who say “well, look, the concept of knowledge is so demanding, rigorous, complicated, committal, what have you, that we really ought not to characterize what we have as knowledge and we’re after as truth, because it’s all too contextual and too diversified into many fundamentally different ways of looking at things.” The whole idea, and especially in philosophical issues, of getting at the truth of things is unrealistic and implausible, and the best we can do in cognitive matters is to focus on those things which we find to be useful and effective, and so if you ask me, you know, “is two and two four?” or “is Nigeria located in Africa?”, the best way to address this sort of question is simply to ask whether the belief or contention that they show is useful as a commitment to operate on in the world. This is sort of Bertrand Russell’s caricature of pragmatism and is open to all the standard sort of objection that what’s useful very much depends on the context in which you’re working. It might be imminently sensible to treat as useful a variety of racial beliefs in Nazi Germany or a variety of beliefs about the problems of evolutionary biology in Soviet Russia. Anyway, okay, so there’re too many different ways of being useful and too many different


ways of treating imminently weird and counterproductive – what would seem to be weird beliefs – as somehow validated by their utility in various sorts of contexts of operation.

That kind of pragmatism certainly isn’t Peirceian. It has Jamesian aspects, because James, in the context of religious convictions, seemed to go at times in that direction, although there are probably as many Jameses as there are James months or James years in the career of this individual, but, in any event, the idea here is that of what I call “thesis pragmatism,” that is to say to address issues of utility to particular theses and contentions, and my substitute or replacement for this kind of pragmatism, the right way, I think, to work out the pragmatic program, is to say “no, what we should do in applying the pragmatic ideal of utility is not to address particular theses, but rather to address processes, procedures, in that sense and so on, and that the natural way to evaluate anything that’s sort of methodological, instrumental, procedural in character, is to ask ‘does the thing work?’” Well by “work” you mean “is it efficient and effective in enabling you to realize those objectives for which that instrument or method or resource is instituted?”, and now you ask yourself, you know, “on the side of commission, what is it in functional instrumental terms that is the objective enterprise? Why do we seek to have information about the world?” Well, there are of course some purely theoretical benefits. We alleviate doubt. We alleviate ignorance. We feel comfortable that we have answers to questions. So, to get answers to our questions instead of doubt would be one such option, but there’re also many, many other aspects to it, and those have to do with the fact that we humans have evolved in nature as beings that function in the world on the basis of our beliefs and our understandings about how things go. You know, you can be many, many types of creatures with automatic kinds of responses, with instinctive kinds of responses. They find their ways of operating in nature, on the whole a complex variety of ways, but the idea of inquiry and working things out isn’t sort of on their agenda. It is on ours. So, what we do with information is we use it partly to get answers to our questions, but partly also to guide our conduct and mode of operation in the world, to enable us to


decide what to do. Is that mushroom safe to eat or not? Is the dam going to burst or not? We do all of those kinds of things with it. So, what I want to say is that the obviously appropriate criterion for deciding whether or not something is the case, whether or not some thesis is correct, is to apply the standard methods of inquiry and science and investigation, observation and so on, but that what you are involved in when you’re asking yourself “are these methods the appropriate ones?” There’re many ways of getting answers to questions, and there’re many methods for resolving issues. Writing out the possibilities and throwing a dart at them is one. The guidance of dreams is another. For a long period of human history, one thought of dreams as sources of information about the world every bit as reliable, and maybe more decisive, than observation, but what ultimately works to the disadvantage of these alternative methods is that the products that they deliver into our hands are not comparably useful. If you design your campaigns on the indication of soothsayers and the reading of tea leaves, you’re less likely to have it work out successfully than you do in our era. So, the idea is that what pragmatism is a natural standard for is the acceptability of processes, procedures, and methods that, among the processes, procedures, and methods that we have, are methods and procedures of inquiry, that is, question/answer, that here the standard of efficacy is the usual one – “does the deliberances of those methods enable us have things which we can use effectively to resolve the issues that we need to resolve by any means?”, and so this is a methodological rather than a thesis pragmatism, and it’s geared to the validation of processes and procedures rather than specifically answering a specific question. We answer questions, which are rational processes, and we validate those processes as rational by fundamentally pragmatic standards. That’s the line. At times, incidentally, of course, thought proposes. We conjecture, we devise thought instrumentalities for handling things, and then whether those thought instrumentalities, seen as instrumentalities, work out right, whether those conceptions are useful as a way of categorizing anything, is going to be answered by ultimately a pragmatic sort of resource, so that in this regard we do indeed devise ideas and conceptions and theories out of whole


intellectual cloth, but if we’re rational we will test them through the use of methods and processes that do have a kind of pragmatic validation behind them. So, the whole business of cognitive construction that’s involved in the idealization that we work with is not a free construction. It’s a construction where there are sort of objective constraints, and those objective constraints beyond our control isn’t simply an intellectual thing about what’s pleasing and what we like, what we find convenient. It’s subject to this control, ultimately, of the efficacy of application when we put those ideas and conceptions to work in describing, predicting, controlling, and so on. So the test of theory is application, and that’s where the pragmatic business comes in. The nature of a theory’s ideal, but it’s not a free-floating ideal.

HOBBS: You defend a kind of pluralism. Would you discuss a bit about what you mean by “perspectival pluralism” and “orientational pluralism”? How do we uphold pluralism without being led into an unfortunate relativism?

RESCHER: The second is the absolutely critical issue. Pluralism, of course, starts out from the fact of life that different people, different thinkers, different eras, different places and times, have different views and different positions. What I like to use by way of an analogy in thinking about pluralism is the conditional relationship between evidence and conclusions. What does it make sense to conclude will of course depend critically on what the evidence at your disposal is. At the one stage of the game, it was perfectly natural to think of the sun as a large fire, to think of the processes there as fundamentally combustion processes. At a later stage of the game, once you realize that there are thermonuclear reactions and that this is something quite different in nature from a combustion process, you have to think of it in a different sort of way. There is a natural connection between the state of opinion and information available in one place in one time and what it makes sense to think on that basis. What I think a rational pluralist can do is to say “look, it’s perfectly normal, natural, and to be expected that different people on the basis of different backgrounds of


experience and different life settings should think differently about things, and that’s perfectly rational and I can respect it, because if I were asked to work things out on that basis, as a sensible person I’d work it out in much the same way, so that we respect, as it were, the differences of view and judgment that different periods and times and circumstances call for, because the basis of judgment, in terms of the experience of the people who live under those conditions, is different, and that something is, as it were, appropriate for them, given those circumstances and conditions, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily appropriate for me, given the here and now and given the circumstances and conditions under which I function and the sort of experiences that I’ve had that we need to prioritize what goes on in life in certain kinds of ways.” So, I think what it makes sense to have for pluralism is a contextualism, a contextualism that says “in different contexts of stages of experience, thought, information, prioritization of what counts as central under those conditions, it makes sense to work things out in this or that sort of differently constituted sort of way. That doesn’t relieve me of the responsibility of forming, as best I can, my own resolution to those questions and saying “well, I think these to be the right ones, because in the circumstances under which I live and function, this is the appropriate way to go,” but it doesn’t also mean that I have to take a negative view – neither do I have to say that they’re right for me. Nor do I have to say that they’re wrong for them. It’s a complex negotiation between contextual features and the way in which things get worked out. So, that’s what I mean by perspective. Perspective means to occupy a certain point of view in the framework of information. I take it experience is something that’s also broader than information, because it also has to do with values, because in various kinds of contexts certain sorts of priorities are the natural ones to have, because the circumstances call for putting those – it’s a matter of agenda constitution – putting those items high on the agenda of concern. Okay, so we can have pluralism without relativism, because relativism says “anything goes – it just doesn’t matter.” It does matter! There’s a right way of doing it, and there’s a right way of doing it even for them given that that’s what their information and


circumstances are. So it’s not just that I can say “even for those guys existing, even for scientists of Newton’s day, certain kinds of things didn’t really make good sense – they should’ve known better, that more information was available to them and so on and so forth.”

HOBBS: How can idealism and realism collaborate?

RESCHER: We’ve gone into that, obliquely, because we said “there are, from a pragmatic point of view, reality constraints, reality principles.” So, the idealism comes into it because we are formulating the questions. We are devising the frame of reference within which they’re being treated and discussed and so on, but whether the resolutions work or not can, at certain points at least, be tested out. In a scientific context, of course, it’s whether the bridge collapses or stands up. In more complex social contexts, it’s whether people living in those circumstances find that the shoe pinches or that they are desparately wishing for things to be different or whether they’re reasonably content to go along with things as they are.

HOBBS: How would you characterize your development during what has been a long career in philosophy?

RESCHER: Isaiah Berlin spoke of there being two different kinds of beings, the hedgehog and the fox. The hedgehog knows a small part of the terrain very well, and the fox, who ranges more broadly, goes off to the chicken coop off his normal terrain and sticks his neck out in different things and so on. They’re different beings. They’re beings who’re narrowly constituted and beings who’re broadly constituted in intellectual regards. Both, I think, have positive and negative aspects. I like to contrast myself, in terms of the kind of philosopher I am, with my now unfortunately deceased former Princeton graduate student colleague John Rawls. John really defined the area in which he was going to work with his doctoral dissertation, and apart from the work that he did on historical issues, you can say that the whole of his career revolved


around issues of a rather tightly defined range of evaluative and socio-political concerns in the area of justice and distributive justice and fairness and these concepts, and he sank a very, very deep and interesting shaft, mining an awful lot of stuff out, but within this very defined area that he cultivated for the entirety of his life. I’m a very different sort of philosopher. I have many interests in very different areas, and the field, from my point of view, looks like a clock. You know what a clock does. It’s a while over here, it’s a while over here, it’s a while over here, and it eventually gets back to over here. That’s sort of what I do. I mean I worked on Leibniz in my doctoral dissertation, but again and again, after doing other kinds of things, I’ll go back to Leibniz, and most of the things I’ve worked on, I’ve worked on in that sort of way. I’ve worked out some aspect of part of what I’m concerned about here and then go on to other things and sort of take a fresh look at different issues now from a different point of view and go on to others, and then ultimately I’ll get back to it. So, I would characterize the structure of my development as fairly broad ranging, fairly fox-like, but cyclic, going through issues and sort of getting back to them – not rewriting the same book, but touching again on issues of the problem-field, from a different angle. Of course, also, as a result of this I’ve written a lot of stuff, but you also have to realize it’s been a long career. Next year will be my fifty-fifth year as a teacher of philosophy. That’s a long time. If you write, you know, a book a year, maybe two books a year, or two books every three years, you’re gonna have an awful lot of productivity over that long of a career. Now, the other thing is – how would I characterize my development? There are, again, I think, two differently constituted courses of development. The contrast case here may be Hilary Putnam. There is not one Hilary Putnam. There are may be eight Hilary Putnams, and as Hilary’s developed his career and his work, even when he deals again with the same issues, he’ll have a totally different and sometimes entirely inconsistent position. So if changing your mind is growth, then Hilary is a very growing philosopher, because he really does change his mind on fundamental issues ongoingly.


I’m not like that. You know, maybe I’m a no-grow type philosopher. I don’t think there’s any fundamental issue on which I take a view radically different now from what I took a long time ago. What I will do is I will try to deepen the basis. I’ll try to illuminate and clarify and extent the position from different points of view. I’ll amplify. I’ll refine. I’ll extent. I’ll coordinate. I’ll do all sorts of things to it, but it still is the same old it that was there right along. I mean, surely on points of scholarly detail here, and especially in history as other things come to light, one may say things a bit differently, but I would say on basic philosophical issues, the program that I’ve developed is exfoliative. It takes what’s gone before as given and goes on to grow the thing out in some way from there. So that’s how I would characterize the career.

HOBBS: Even though you have tended not to change your mind on substantial issues like someone like Hilary Putnam, as you’ve mentioned, is there nonetheless anything that you regret having published?

RESCHER: I hate to say no. I want to say two things. One, there’s nothing that I have published that I would publish again in exactly the same way, that is to say where I don’t think that the job could be done in some way that is improveable upon. Certainly as far as the elimination of typos is concerned, one of my great regrets is that I really need a good editor, and I don’t always from publishers get that, because my style of writing is to write things in long-hand. I don’t ever compose on a machine. I’ll write it in long-hand. My handwriting is pretty bad. Estelle (my assistant) can read it. She can probably read it better than I can. Estelle transforms it into text, readable text, and then we go on from there, and, you know, often there are slips between the cup and the lip, and ninety-nine out of a hundred cases I’ll catch them, but every once in a while they get by me and ultimately evolve into the printed version too. So it’s not that I don’t have any perfectionistic view of anything that I’ve put into print. It can certainly be improved upon, typographically, I mean, orthographically, but the thing that I want to say is that it’s


always a matter of working one’s way through later things on the basis of earlier ones. I would be able to improve the discussion now if I were to write the same book again, but I wouldn’t be where I am in the position to do that if I hadn’t worked my way through to this level on the basis of having gone through this stage. Now, if you are too perfectionistic about publication, what you’re going to do is never publish anything, because you will put it aside, and you will say “experience teaches that every time I’ve put it aside for six months and have gone back to it, I’ve been able to improve it, and that having gone on all this time in the past, it will also go on in the future, and so if I publish it now I’m cutting off all those possible improvements that would come in the future if I were to get back to it.” That’s not my way of looking at it. My way of looking at is “I’ve got to quit thinking about this, because (a) there’re other things I want to go on to – I want to move the clock around some more and think about issues, and (b) there’s a law of diminishing returns, that the improvements that you make from a first draft to a second draft.” It’s like the paradoxes of Zeno, right? In order to go from here, you have to hit the halfway point, and then, from here to here you have to hit the halfway point, and from here to here. Okay, with each revision you’re going to improve it, but the first improvement takes you half the way to the ideal, and the next one takes you half the way from where you’ve been to here, and the next one takes you half the way, and after a while you begin to wonder “is it worth it?” I mean, the fact that I’m sort of ninety-nine percent there doesn’t indicate that I should now do anything whatever to get that remaining percent. Forget about the remaining percent! Go on to something else, and that’s my style. So, anyway, the answer is no, I don’t regret having published anything, not because I couldn’t do it better, but because of this general structure that I’ve described.

HOBBS: What are your most important books?

RESCHER: The most important books, from my point of view, are not the ones that have sold most or gotten sort of the most resonance. If you ask me what my most important book in that


sense is, it’s a little book on luck that was published commercially rather than by some academic press. It sold, oh I don’t know, twelve thousand copies in the U.S., whereas usually my philosophical books sell two or three at best. It was translated into several other languages, and this was done reasonably well. It’s a nice little book, but from my point of view importance of a book lies in its opening up a series of issues and concerns and investigative opportunities that lead to other things that’re productive for future developments. So those books which have gotten me started on lines of thought that I find interesting and ongoingly significant are the ones that I think are important. That includes, I would say, one book I’ve never published, my doctoral dissertation, which was on Leibniz, but it led to a whole ongoing series of concerns with Leibnizian issues, the book on the coherence theory of truth which led to a whole long series of other things which are based on the sorts of mechanisms, the book on methodological pragmatism which got me started on trying to work out that program, a book on scientific progress which led me to apply sort of sadometric and statistical techniques to philosophy of science issues. Anyway, okay, there’re other examples I could give you, but of the ninety some books I’ve published, I would single out about five as being of this sort, that they opened up lines of thought and inquiry that then led to further things down the road.

HOBBS: Is there something about doing philosophy that makes us better people?

RESCHER: One would like to think so, but I don’t think this is in fact the case, and, well, there are two aspects to it. One is that people are drawn to philosophy often as not, not by sympathies, but by aversions, that is to say the motivation is not so much to build forward something that they see as simply positive and to be approved of, but one goes into to because one wants to set people straight because one thinks they’re being wrong-headed and doing things that don’t make any sense, so that there is often in the motivation to go into philosophy a somewhat negative view of what others are doing. Moreover, of course, philosophy is sort of


often practiced as an adversary procedure. We do in fact help others by criticizing and by trying to pick holes in what they’re doing. That is a way of being helpful. It does help to eliminate problems and strengthen their case and so on, but it does create sort of non-cooperative frame of mind that doesn’t tend to socialize people. Moreover, academic life doesn’t really socialize people. In more business oriented things, you have to live with people. You have to get on with them, whereas in academic life there is a tendency to go our own way. We have our own little range of concern, and we stick with it. We have the security of tenure, so we don’t have to worry about staying on good terms with our colleagues. I think the nature of academic life and the nature of philosophical interaction is such as really not to give much positive reinforcement to the affective, positive, sharing, interactive side of humans. So, no, I don’t think so, certainly not philosophy as a professional activity. It’s an interesting question. If you look at philosophers, as opposed to people picked on any other basis, have they been better people? Well, there aren’t any outstandingly bad guys among them, I guess. I can’t think of a philosopher-serial-killer or something of that nature.

HOBBS: Peirce never returned some library books, I think.

RESCHER: That’s true. That’s true. Yeah, well, Schopenhauer, when he was reproached with not living a better life, said that it was quite enough that a philosopher should be called upon to explicate the nature of moral life. That he should be called upon to exemplify it as well was going too far, and there may be that to it.

HOBBS: So back to pragmatism – you earlier used the phrase “realistic pragmatism.” Of course, that’s the very title of your introduction to pragmatism, Realistic Pragmatism: An Introduction to Pragmatic Philosophy, just published five years ago. What led you to write this introduction?

RESCHER: Every once in a while the teacher in me overwhelms the scholar, and I get the urge to write something for the use of


students, so that they can – not just for the use of colleagues – but that students can get their way into some aspect or other of things. You know, I think I’ve written three books largely along those lines. There’s the edition of the Monadology that I did called The Monadology: An Edition for Students, which is really a set of sort of teaching aids for this text to get it across, and I’ve written an introduction to pragmatism and also one to process philosophy, in each case, you know, partly to propagandize it. It’s partly to make accessible to teachers and students, conveniently, access to a field that I think is important and interesting and worth cultivating.

HOBBS: But you are also concerned – are you not? – to recover pragmatism’s good name from the clutches of Richard Rorty.

RESCHER: Oh yes, yes, yes. There is that, yes. There is that motivation. You’re right that I think that pragmatism has fallen on evil days in some ways and that what I think to be the good and useful part of pragmatism, that is, it’s connection with reality principle, with monitoring the tenability and rational credentials of various processes, rather than washing them away or replacing them by something else. I think of pragmatism not as a replacement for the idea of a pursuit of truth, but as a way of implementing and canalizing that venture. So, that’s what I mean by realistic pragmatism – a pragmatism that tries in a positive way to use pragmatic ideas in the interest of inquiry, rather than a suggestion that the whole traditional process of inquiry and the pursuit of truth be replaced by different and various less rigorous and more freewheeling kinds of things. HOBBS: In your autobiographical essay entitled “In Retrospect” (in the recent book The Philosophical I, edited by George Yancy), you say that in response to people who talk about a kind of post-epistemological era, you sort of have a one word response to that, and that one word response is “hogwash.” So, do you still agree with that? Do you have any other one word descriptions you’d like to add to that?


RESCHER: Maybe I was carried away a bit there, but I think we have too much of a tendency to want to speak of things as “post,” that is to say to translate to the regions of the unavailable past tendencies of thought and ideas that we find inconvenient. I think that’s too free and easy a rhetorical devise. So, no, I don’t think we’re living in a post-epistemological era, because I see the idea of epistemology as something quite different from its opponents. Its opponents are geared to view that the truth is something so absolute and irrefrangible that it’s effectively beyond the possibility of human reach, and I want to say that what matters – I mean maybe it’s a misnomer, because epistemology goes back to “episteme,” which has to do with knowledge and truth – but I see the project in somewhat different terms. I think there are things which, again, contextually and circumstantially – it’s relative to the evidence at our disposal and so on – it makes sense to think of things which are nonsense, which it doesn’t make sense to think. There are things which are rationally substantiable, and there are things which aren’t, and that it’s in this terrain of trying to explore what it is about a belief, about an idea, about a principle, that makes them tenable and appropriate as opposed to untenable and misleading or mistaken. That criteriology is built in to the commitment to reason that we have as philosophers, and we have to be concerned for standards of acceptability, of arguability, of tenability, that the whole field isn’t a devastated plain in which everything is on the same level with everything else, but that there are some things out there which are, in a normative sense, in an epistemically normative sense, more supportable than others, and that’s what we have to explore within epistemology. Nor do I think we live in a post-philosophical age. I think we can not put philosophy behind us, because, for one thing, the very question of what philosophy is and what philosophy can do is itself a philosophical question. Meta-philosophy is a branch of philosophy, and the person who says “there’s nothing one can say sensibly in philosophy, and we ought to give it up,” is not a person who’s outside of philosophy, but a person who’s occupying a certain difficult and untenable position within philosophy itself.


HOBBS: What kind of a future does the pragmatist tradition have?

RESCHER: I think that pragmatism, probably like most other large scale philosophical positions, other –isms, has a secure future, and I think this for the following reason. It’s very dangerous and inappropriate to issue death warrants in philosophy. No sooner does someone come along and say this or that kind of thing is gone for good than some other person finds this to be the challenge for bringing it back to life in some form. Now, the thing about any –ism, be it idealism or realism or what have you – pragmatism – is that it’s not a fixed, tightly definable, definite contention or view or doctrine, but is a direction. It’s a tendency, and that tendency is like a river. If it’s blocked in one direction, it’ll flow off to somewhere else so that even radical skepticism of some sort is very likely in some way or other to make a comeback, because some clever and slightly perverse person like Peter Unger will come along and revive it.

So I don’t think there’s any way of writing pragmatism off. The question therefore is one of deciding how much life there is to it in competition with other kinds of positions, and here I think it very much depends. If pragmatism becomes a pragmatism of the soft, anything goes, we-can’t-operate-any-reasonable-standards, it’s-all-a-matter-of-what-one-finds-useful-at-the-time-and-for-the-particular-purpose-at-hand-at-the-moment, then, I think the future of pragmatism is dim because it doesn’t ultimately make good sense to develop that sort of position as a serious commitment. If what I call realistic pragmatism is able to prevail, then its future is brighter, because I think that position has, internally, a lot more to be said for it. So, I think it very much depends. The other comment, of course, is the little anecdote I like to quote about the jazz musician who was asked where jazz was going, who replied “if we knew that, I’d be there already.” It’s very hard to know where something is going in philosophy, because if we felt strongly that this was the way it was going to work itself out, then we would most likely make steps to jump on the bandwagon of history and get there first.


HOBBS: How do you think your philosophical work will be viewed a century from now?

RESCHER: Yeah, a hundred years from now, of course, we’ll all be dead. That’s the first remark to make, and one hopes that there is something in one’s work that people will do something with, but, on the other hand, it’s a tricky business, because, of course, when you come to the consideration of what people do with your work, you face a very difficult existential question, namely whether it’s better to be ignored or to be misunderstood, because I think to some extent the choice is there.

HOBBS: Those are the only two options?

RESCHER: I think those are the only two options, yeah, I think, with very, very rare exceptions. You know, I’ll give you an analogue. If you’ve ever been concerned in any episode that makes it way into the newspapers, and I hope you haven’t, but if you ever have or will be, you soon get to realize that there are always deep problems of adequacy and accuracy in third person accounts of something that you know at first hand, and the thing that happens to philosophers when other philosophers take them up and do something with their work is often is not something that would make them turn in their graves if they were able to read it there. I don’t know how pleased Marx would be with what has been done in his name, and that’s probably true for most other philosophers. I say that to mean that only very rarely – well, I mean, Aristotle started this, right, I mean Aristotle’s use of the work of his predecessors. It’s splendid in a way that he did have that much reference to them, because we’d know a heck of a lot less about them if it weren’t for the fact that we can get there through him. Yet, on the other hand, I think all too often he uses them for his own purposes and ends and does that in a way which rather may impede than help one’s understanding of what it was that they really had in mind and were after. So there we are. One hopes in a way that people later on will make some use or some reference to one’s work, but one is


also inclined to look on that with a somewhat skeptical eye. The shortest piece I ever wrote, I wrote quite early in my career when I was working much more in logic than I am now, and it was an abstract of maybe half a page which outlined an idea in logic that I was going to present at some meeting. If you’ve studied symbolic logic you know that everything is based on universal and existential quantifiers. The whole of quantificational logic is based on this idea of at least one and for all, and it occurred to me that there was another quantifier out there which exemplified a range of other possibilities of course, a plurality quantifier which says it’s for most, and which has a variety of interesting logical features which separate it from the way in which the standard quantifiers work. I wrote that up in about half a page to present at this meeting. This thing was picked up another logician who did something with it, and then other logicians jumped on board and did things with it, and if you do a search in the search engine of something called “the Rescher quantifier,” you’ll find there’s a very substantial literature, probably a larger literature on this little thing which I threw off in an idle moment of musing speculation about how quantifiers work then anything else that I’ve done more seriously. I mean I’m happy that people picked this up and that it led to other developments and things that have deeper ramifications and so on, but it’s curious in a way that of the handful of things I’ve done with which my name is associated, this is probably the most prominent out there, and it’s certainly not something that I would regard – if you were to ask me, you know, what the things I’ve done that are significant or that I’m proud of and that I’m attached to, it wouldn’t figure very high on the list. So, all I’m saying is it’s almost impossible to know what will happen to one’s work further on, because one never can tell what people will find useful and what will lead to what and where things will happen to it, and one has no control over it, and it’s not gonna go as necessarily or even very likely as one would like to have it go. So, that’s about all I can say. In a way, I mean, this goes back to your subject of death, right? One would like something to survive, and one is not going to survive one’s self. Even one’s offspring are mortal. If you build a building or anything, that’s


going to collapse. The only thing that can endure for a long period of time is an idea, something in the cognitive rather than the physical realm. So I guess one has a natural want to survive and hopes that in some way or other something one does will be used and referred to and noted further on. But it’s a funny business, that whole idea.

HOBBS: What do you do when you are not reading, teaching, or writing philosophy?

RESCHER: Well, first of all, I have a family, and I have a family life. My children are grown, although two of them live in the Pittsburgh area, and I see them fairly regularly and we do things together. We’re on good terms, and then I have some children who live away. I visit them – one in Alexandria, Virginia, one in San Francisco. I have only one grandchild, because my children, though grown and of marriageable age, are not in there reproducing to the extent that a potential grandparent would like to see, but, never-mind, I have at least one grandchild at the moment, and what else do I do? I read when I have time, which isn’t all that much, and I’ve gotten this with increasing years to the point where I find it more and more difficult and resistance-worthy to deal with fiction. So I read either history or biography. I deal largely with things completely outside of my field, just for the sake of distraction, but still dealing with some aspect of reality or other, and I somehow or other I got interested in the Civil War, as many people do, and I’ve read quite a bit of, again, history and biography around the Civil War. I even have one Civil War publication.

HOBBS: I was right about to ask about that. So I’ve noticed in a bibliography of your writings that you’ve got a couple of pieces that do not appear to be obviously philosophical, one of those being “Niagra-on-the-Lake as a Confederate Refuge” [2003], which I’m sure you’re referring to now, and the other being Animal Conversations: A Collection of Fables [1994]. What are these?


RESCHER: Animal Conversations came about because, after many years of reading stuff to children, I sort of got into the mode and I got intrigued with the idea of writing some Aesop-like fables, and I wrote a couple, and I found this guy in England who does very nice illustrations, and, when I saw what nice illustrations he did, I wrote a couple more, and so I have this book, the main virtue of which are these illustrations by my English friend rather than my own little fables, but they are animal conversations. The other thing is that Niagra-on-the-Lake is the site of the Shaw festival, just as Stratford does their Shakespearean things. So, Niagra-on-the-Lake in Canada does Shaw – not only Shaw, but things of that period and era and things influenced by him and so on. We started to go up there for a weekend in the spring to go see some plays at the Shaw festival, and when I became acquainted a little bit with the community, I realized that there was something that people did not at all realize and had become totally lost in the local historical consciousness. Even the historical society people there didn’t know about it, and that is that in the era immediately after Appomattox, when much of the political leadership of the South, of the Confederacy, headed for safety abroad – some to Europe, some to Mexico, and some to Canada – and there was a period of time when there was quite a colony of ex-confederate leaders up in Niagra-on-the-Lake, and, realizing that people had forgotten about that there, I wrote for the historical society a little account of this period of confederate exile.

HOBBS: What kind of projects are you currently working on?

RESCHER: At the moment I’m working on two projects at different stages of completion. One of them has to do with attempts to quantify knowledge. I call it “epistemetrics,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s an attempt to look at some issues in the theory of knowledge from a quantitative point of view, and the other is related to an interest I’ve long had in the concept of plausibility. In the theory of knowledge, we have a lot of lore about knowledge of course, and a lot of lore about probability, but there is another concept out there, namely that of plausibility, which has


to do with things that we think. We have some inclination to give them credence. We say “well, yeah, I really don’t quite know that it’s so, but it seems reasonable and plausible that it should be.” So we have some positive inclination to accept it, but we’re not in a position to regard it the way we regard knowledge as money in the bank, and it the concept has logical features of its own, among things, well, truth must be consistent, and the body of truth has to be a coherent manifold. It’s perfectly possible that mutually incompatible things can both be plausible. So, I’m dealing with this sort of sub-optimal concept of cognitive commitment that’s at issue in plausibility and trying to build some models for and work out some applications for it.

HOBBS: I believe there are now a few doctoral dissertations on the philosophy of Nicholas Rescher. How does that make you feel, and are they doing a good job?

RESCHER: I think that’s almost answered in the discussion we had earlier on about things that have to do with posterity. I’m happy to see people find the thing interesting. I’m delighted to see that they’re in there discussing it. Occasionally what they say about it makes my hair stand on end, if I had any, or would make my hair stand on end if I had any, but, no, I’m pleased that people are looking at those things and are concerned about them, though naturally I don’t always – you know, philosophers really don’t write things to agree with each other. We write in the main to pick holes and quarrels and so on, which is fine, because, as I say, it’s a form of collaboration. If I say something, and you object to it, you give me opportunity to revise, refine, amend, and so on, and so I’m delighted whenever somebody deals with my work, whether it’s critically or otherwise. I’m delighted to see it, because I do consider it an oblique and possibly unwilling form of collaboration.


Jean Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. by Kathryn Plant, (New York: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003), 256 pages, cloth $80.00 (ISBN# 077352469X), paperback $22.95 (ISBN 0773524703).

Jean Grondin has added another outstanding work to his already impressive collection of writings on hermeneutics and Gadamer in particular. His book The Philosophy of Gadamer, translated by Kathryn Plant, published by McGill-Queens University Press is his most recent book length publication. He has previously written such works as Sources of Hermeneutics, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics and a biography of Hans-Georg Gadamer, titled Gadamer, but this latest work is in my opinion his best work to-date. Though admittedly prejudiced in my interest, Grondin’s work provides a concise and detailed look at the entirety of Gadamer’s thought, providing a source that brings together many of the themes that have shown Gadamer to be a significant figure in philosophic history. There have been numerous commentaries on Gadamer’s thought, but Grondin seems to stand alone in trying to show the interrelatedness and cohesiveness of Gadamer’s thought from the subjects found in Truth and Method. As a result, those who seek an introductory or supplementary reading to not only Gadamer’s thought as a whole, but his magnum opus, will find Grondin’s book excellent in this regard.

The book’s structure follows a critical view of Truth and Method, while drawing connections to the whole of Gadamer’s work and thought. Grondin attempts to take up Gadamer’s understanding of hermeneutics and use this in his own interpretative endeavor. The introduction provides a brief biographic description of Gadamer’s life and situates his work in the context of a life long concern over the privilege given to methodological means to access truth. This concern arises out of what Gadamer sees as method’s attempt to “monopolize” all in-roads to truth, not just limiting itself to the realms of natural science, but to those of the human sciences as well. Cartesianism stands as the origin of the problematic nature of our relation to truth. From this admission, Grondin finds Gadamer questioning two elements coming from Descartes, the


assurance that indubitability and certainty can be found in all of knowledge’s various modes and the wish “to look for this keystone only in the evidence of thinking about our own thoughts.” What this amounts to for Gadamer, according to Grondin, is a negligent view of the role of tradition and prejudice regarding knowledge and practice. Moreover, it obscures the essential limitation of human being, i.e., human finitude. This concept of human finitude is stressed throughout Grondin’s book due to its connection to Gadamerian themes and what Grondin seems to want to highlight in the notion of vigilance.

Grondin’s introduction also presents Gadamer’s philosophic career in its involvement with other important contemporary figures in the German philosophic heritage. Studying initially with neo-Kantians such as Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann, he eventually came under the sway of the profound influence of Martin Heidegger. Additionally, the introduction points to the fact that throughout his academic career Gadamer has maintained a close affinity to art and literature, as well as the ancient Greeks. This affinity has allowed Gadamer to continue to return to hermeneutic themes found in poetry and art, as well as Plato and Aristotle, interpreting and reinterpreting in the continual process of trying to come to understanding.

The chapters that follow the introduction, as mentioned previously, take up the various themes of Truth and Method. There are five chapters that roughly correspond to the sections of Gadamer’s book. The first chapter, “The Problem of Method and the Project of a Hermeneutics of the Human Sciences,” initiates Grondin’s study. In this chapter Grondin, following Gadamer, begins with the passage from Rilke that opens Truth and Method and continues to trace the sections of Part I. Grondin shows how Gadamer begins with questioning whether the methodological assurance of certainty of the natural sciences is appropriate to the truth found in the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). This question is focused on the experience of art and aesthetic consciousness. The encounter with art is one that calls into question the denigrating attitude fostered by the “exact,” methodologically oriented sciences of the nineteenth century


toward aesthetics. Grondin accurately situates the significance of Gadamer’s query and prepares the reader for Gadamer’s engagement with Kant. It is Kant who even though having ties to the humanist tradition, nevertheless placed obtainable knowledge strictly in the sphere of the natural sciences.

The second chapter of Grondin’s book, “Truth After Art,” finishes the topics of Part I of Truth and Method by examining its second section. In this section of Gadamer’s work we find the overarching theme of the ontology of the work of art. Grondin dutifully portrays Gadamer’s endeavor to reclaim the experience of art. In the first chapter Grondin had shown Gadamer questioning the denigration of the “truth” found by the unmethodological human sciences. The second chapter continues to show Gadamer’s exploration of the truth in art; now exposing the difference between the two ways to truth and showing the essential connection to the world and possibility of self-understanding that is revealed in such an experience with art. Grondin’s chapter, in transitioning from aesthetic experience to hermeneutics, rightly acknowledges the fundamental example the experience of art provides for Gadamer’s hermeneutics.

The second part of Truth and Method is taken up in the third chapter and is relatively short. This may be due to Gadamer’s “historical preparation” in establishing his vision of hermeneutics. Though Gadamer’s survey of hermeneutic history shows how he is both tied and distinct from such Romantics and historians as, Schleiermacher, Ranke, Droysen and Dilthey, it is the significance of his critique that Grondin highlights. What is pointed out in looking at Schleiermacher and the historical school that followed in his wake are several of the important critical insights necessary in understanding Gadamer. The first insight Grondin brings into relief comes from Schleiermacher’s emphasis on understanding; Schleiermacher desires to understand the author better than the author does him or herself. As a result the subject’s creation of meaning is investigated and found to be lacking in the acknowledgement of its involvement with history. Gadamer’s stress on the influence of the past on the present creation of meaning comes from this encounter and gives rise to the idea that meaning

an interview with nicholas rescher

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