Nicholas Rescher

Review of "Nicholas Rescher, Essais sur les fondements de l'ontologie du procès, trans. by M. Weber, Ontos, 2006"

by Frederic Tremblay

Published in Philosophiques, vol. 34, n. 2, 2007, pp. 419-421

Review of "Nicholas Rescher, Metaphysics: The Key Issues From A Realistic Perspective, Amherst (NY): Prometheus Books, 2006"

by Frederic Tremblay

Published in Philosophiques, vol. 34, n. 1, 2007, pp. 217-219

Process Philosophy: Via Idearum or Via Negativa?

by Anderson Weekes

In: Michel Weber (ed.), After Whitehead: Rescher on Process Metaphysics (Frankfurt/Lancaster: Ontos Verlag, ISBN 3-937202-49-8), 2004, pp. 223–266.
English

Nicholas Rescher’s way of understanding process philosophy reflects the ambitions of his own philosophical project and... more Nicholas Rescher’s way of understanding process philosophy reflects the ambitions of his own philosophical project and commits him to a conceptually ideal interpretation of process. Process becomes a transcendental idea of reflection that can always be predicated of our knowledge of the world and of the world qua known, but not necessarily of reality an sich. Rescher’s own taxonomy of process thinking implies that it has other variants. While Rescher’s approach to process philosophy makes it intelligible and appealing to mainstream analytic philosophy, it leaves behind the more daring ideas of Bergson, James, and Whitehead, all of whom envisioned the primordial reality of process in a radical ontology of becoming. This variant of process thought can be construed as coherent and self-consistent, but not without relinquishing the correspondence theory of truth and embracing challenging ideas that bring us in close proximity to existentialism, apophatic theology, and Buddhism.

Review of Rescher & Brandom's The Logic of Inconsistency

by Lorenzo Peña

Contextos 3, pp. 241-45. ISSN 0212-6192
1984

KEYWORDS: negational inconsistency, patterns of rationality, negation, Peirce, contradictoriality, logical theorems,... more KEYWORDS: negational inconsistency, patterns of rationality, negation, Peirce, contradictoriality, logical theorems, classical logic, inference rules, modus ponens, adjunction, paraconsistent logics.

Abstract:
Construyen nuestros dos autores un marco modélico de conformidad con el cual quepa admitir (como posibles o no absurdas) inconsistencias negacionales. Aceptan como compatibles con patrones de racionalidad teorías entre cuyos teoremas haya dos uno de los cuales sea negación del otro. Algunas de las ideas básicas del libro se deben a lainfluencia de Peirce; pero no vinculan nunca expresamente contradictorialidad con gradualidad. Conservan sin alteraciones el acervo de tesis o teoremas de la lógica clásica, a la vez, no obstante, que sacrifican las reglas de inferencia clásicas: no sólo la regla del modus ponens sino también la de adjunción. Conciben mundos superpuestos en los que hay objetos contradictorios que son fusiones de objetos consistentes de mundos normales. Abrigan la esperanza de que nuestro mundo no sea compuesto. Mi reseña subraya que las consecuencias de tales hipótesis son excesivamente difíciles de admitir y que, en definitiva, es más económico optar por una estrategia como la de las lógicas paraconsistentes.