Nicholas Rescher was without question a great man and a great scholar. What is in my estimation even more important, he was among the kindest and wisest human beings I have had the privilege of knowing.

I visited Pitt on sabbatical 50 years ago. I had recently been suffering from a thyroid disease,had been left by my new girl friend only a couple of years after a devastating divorce, and was profoundly depressed. Looking back at that dark time, I am sure that everyone around me knew that I was Ill.

The highlight of my semester at Pitt was attending Nicholas Rescher’s seminar on the philosophy of science. Rescher was an excellent teacher – patient, balanced, thoughtful. But he always took time after each weekly seminar to speak with me. He would invite me to walk over to his office or car with him and we would speak about both philosophy and life. He also encouraged my work and suggested a journal to consider for publishing the paper I wrote for that seminar.

Many years later I read one of Nicholas’s autobiographical books and his wonderful book on unselfishness. Both reflect his philosophical wisdom and his own selflessness. I learned a lot from both books. Here is a reference to the book on unselfishness: https://www.amazon.com/Unselfishness-Vicarious-Affects-Philosophy-Social/dp/0822984539

A couple reflections:

I didn’t know Nicholas Rescher personally, but I still remember to this day that he had a chapter “Canons of Distributive Justice”—in a James Sterba anthology used in one of my first philosophy courses as an undergraduate in the late 1980s—that sparked my interest in political and economic philosophy. This is the field I went to graduate school for, and I think I had even switched majors from the sciences to philosophy shortly after this class. And this path later turned into technology ethics, so I really owe Prof. Rescher for who I am today, despite never having met him.

Also, when I read these announcements, I feel sad not only for the loss of the person (and for their families, etc.), but also for the lack of a general practice of telling people how much they mean to us while they’re alive, while it can still mean something to them.

I know it’s weird to reach out to someone like this, esp. at a time where we might want to vet a person’s positions on politics and other issues before we even want to know them. I’ve reached out in the past to some teachers/professors who were crucial in my life, but not to someone I’ve never met. Many of those I owe a debt to are no longer with us since I’m old af, so it’s too late for them (and me). But I’m going to think about this some more and plan to send some notes out to those who are still around, before there’s no time.

Happy New Year, everyone. It’s often hard to know which one will be your last…

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html

Nick Rescher and Adolf Grunbaum inspired me to switch to Philosophy as an undergrad and took a gamble in bringing me to graduate school at Pitt. As an undergrad I took logic from Nick, and a wonderful wide-ranging course on intellectual history, where I first met Ibn Khaldun. I think Nick translated it himself. Readings were distributed in mimeographed form. At Pitt he taught a course on Leibniz’s logic from Couturat, and a course on Aristotle where he defended a new reading of de Interpretatione Ch. 9. He always encouraged me, and was generous with his time. He helped me polish papers, and advised my dissertation. I was lucky to have known him.

So saddened to hear this. I had the deep honor of taking Rescher’s Kant course when I was an undergraduate at Pitt. What a beautiful soul.

In 2017, when I was in my last year as an undergrad at Pitt, Nicholas Rescher taught an advanced undergraduate seminar on Peirce, James, and Dewey which I had the good fortune to attend. It was only a group of about 10 students and really felt like a graduate seminar (some weeks we would read well over 100 pages of dense pragmatist texts). I can’t quite put into words how much that seminar meant to me, it was the kind of course that I look back on and wish that I could take a second time.

One day in the seminar, I asked an offhand question about the relevance of Hegel to some remark in a William James reading, and Professor Rescher ended up inviting me to come chat in his office and spent nearly two hours asking about my philosophical interests. Even in the very warm and intellectually stimulating environment that Pitt provided me as a philosophy undergrad, he really stood out to me as an unbelievably kind and generous person (in addition, of course, to being a truly great thinker).

About a year ago I wrote him an email thanking him for that conversation and saying how much it had meant to me, and he not only wrote me a lovely reply but even mailed me a copy of a book of his that I had asked about! I feel very lucky to have crossed paths with Nick Rescher, thank you for everything.

I first emailed Nicholas Rescher on October 3, 2021 inviting him to speak online to our group in India which began during Covid in 2020. He responded on October 4 and since then we had a few email exchanges and he always encouraged me to pursue my projects. I was surprised that he did not have a Google Scholar profile page so I urged him to have one put up soon. He did so within a month and his h-index was 80, which I had already somewhat manually calculated. Right now it is at 86. The breadth and depth of his work speaks for itself. He was humble but not void of wit. In a write-up in a book introducing the Pittsburgh School of Sellars, McDowell, Brandom, Nicholas Rescher mentioned in passing the name “Nicholas Rescher” with a qualifying phrase “who was at Pittsburgh before Sellars arrived.” In the context, this was not arrogant but a display of humility and it stated a simple fact that most ignore. In any case his 191 (by my count) journal publications alone for a total of 2411 pages is astounding and I don’t think will ever be surpassed!!!!!