18 Kinesis

Interview with Nicholas Rescher

Charles A. Hobbs
Southern 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
 Volume 31 Number 2 19
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 chobbs@siu.edu or through the Department of
Philosophy at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.
Charles A. Hobbs
Southern 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
20 Kinesis
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
 Volume 31 Number 2 21
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
22 Kinesis
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,
 Volume 31 Number 2 23
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
24 Kinesis
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
 Volume 31 Number 2 25
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
26 Kinesis
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
 Volume 31 Number 2 27
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
28 Kinesis
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
 Volume 31 Number 2 29
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
30 Kinesis
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.
 Volume 31 Number 2 31
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
32 Kinesis
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
 Volume 31 Number 2 33
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
34 Kinesis
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
 Volume 31 Number 2 35
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?
36 Kinesis
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.
 Volume 31 Number 2 37
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.
38 Kinesis
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
 Volume 31 Number 2 39
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
40 Kinesis
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?
 Volume 31 Number 2 41
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
42 Kinesis
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.
 Volume 31 Number 2 43
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
44 Kinesis
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
 Volume 31 Number 2 45
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