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Showing posts from February, 2017

Profile: Nicholas Rescher

Usually the statement that you’ve read nine books by a single author is read as a boast. Not so if the author in question is philosopher Nicholas Rescher, whose list of published books exceeds one hundred and sixty.    Allow me to repeat that in case you think it’s a typo. Nicholas Rescher, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, approaching his eighty-ninth year, has written a hundred and sixty books (a conservative count that excludes his own translations of other work and compilations of collected works by others). In 2010 alone, when he was eighty-two years old, Rescher published thirteen books. In 2016 he let down the team by only publishing four books. Loser.  This prodigious, perhaps insane, productivity is I think casually passed over by commentators as an interesting anecdote to inoculate them from tearing their hair out. His Wikipedia page contains the joke that is passed around about Rescher that he is not one person but a committee.