The book offers a reflection on the nature, scope, and limits of knowledge that have been at the focus of the author's work over decades. The essays collected in this volume expound and extend these efforts in exploring the outer fringes of understanding: the outer boundaries of conceivability, the limits of cognition, and the ramifications of ineffability and paradox. They join in exploring the lay of the land at the boundaries of knowledge.
The first chapters address basic facts regarding the conceptualization of knowledge. This is followed by a study on how to deal with problems relating to the affirmation and considerations of truth. The final chapters scrutinize the limits of demonstration and the inherent impossibility of realizing an ideal systematization of our knowledge of totalities. The book affords novel perspectives regarding the thought of a widely appreciated philosopher. It is an original work aimed for readers interested in the theory of knowledge and philosophy of cognition.
Chapter
1. Default Reasoning.
Chapter
2. Vagueness: a Variant
Approach.
Chapter
3. Conceivability.
Chapter
4. Issues of Identity and
Identification.
Chapter
5. On Explanation and Understanding.
Chapter
6.
Alethic Topology (a Study in Topological Semantics and Paradox).
Chapter
7.
The Logic of Knowledge Distribution.
Chapter
8. Relevance and its Problems.-
Chapter
9. Leibniz and the liar.
Chapter
10. Did Leibniz Anticipate
Gödel.
Chapter
11. Reification Fallacies and Inappropriate Totalities.-
Chapter
12. Mind Questions.
Chapter
13. Intuition and Mathematical
Idealism.
Chapter
14. Outlandish Hypotheses and the Limits of Thought
Experimentation.
Chapter
15. Limitations and the World Beyond (Co-authored
with Patrick Grim).
Chapter
16. Philosophical Confrontations.
Chapter
17.
The Limits of Philosophy.
Chapter
18. The Rational Inescapability of
Philosophizing.
Chapter
19. Antiphilosophy.
NICHOLAS RESCHER is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. In a productive research career extending over six decades he has well over one hundred books to this credit and fourteen books about Reschers philosophy have been published in five languages. He has served as a President of: the American Philosophical Association, the American Catholic Philosophy Association, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, the C. S. Peirce Society, and the American Metaphysical Society, as well as Secretary General of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Sciences. Rescher has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europea, the Royal Society of Canada, and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain. He has been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007, theFounders Medal of the Metaphysical Society of America in 2016, and the Helmholtz Medal of the Germany Academy of Sciences (Berlin/Brandenburg) in 2016. In 2011 he was awarded the premier cross of the Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz Erster Klasse) of the Federal Republic of Germany, and honorary degrees have been awarded to him by eight universities on three continents. In 2010 the University of Pittsburgh honored him with the inauguration of a biennial Rescher Medal for distinguished lifetime contributions to systematic philosophy, and in 2018 the American Philosophical Association launched a Rescher Prize with a similar objective.
