ABSTRACT
The most extensively published academic philosopher in the English language is Nicholas Rescher: he has a hundred books and several hundred articles to his name, and few contemporaries cover so wide a range of fields. For many years he was director of the Center for the Philosophy of Science in the University of Pittsburgh and there inhabited an environment that was renowned for its attachment to scientific enquiry as a paradigm of real and worthwhile knowledge. Pittsburgh has also been home to a tradition of pragmatist philosophy that has sought to make sense of thought, language and action in terms of the practical interests of human animals. Working within this environment of scientific and pragmatist naturalism, and being a major contributor to central areas of study within analytical philosophy, including logic, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of science, it is worth observing, which some will find surprising, that Rescher is a convert to Roman Catholicism. His conversion had personal aspects but it was also an intellectual decision informed by his reflections as a philosopher. Against that background two aspects of his work as a philosopher are of real
importance for the insights they offer into some central and pervasive philosophical issues. The aspects in question are his reflections on religion, and on the nature of philosophy itself conceived of not in terms of its internal problems and specific methods and techniques, but as an aspect of a recurrent response to the human condition. Prominent among the connections between these two aspects of his work is an appreciation of the extent to which ideas, values and beliefs may be pragmatically justified. As he puts it in the essay on ‘Religion and Pragmatism’:
[A] belief or practice is rationally warranted to the extent that its acceptance and implementation yield results that align with the expectations that its acceptance underwrites.2
