Many theologians found in Alfred North Whitehead's ideas answers to questions they had been seeking, or, if the word 'answers' is a bit too strong, at least a framework that had fewer problems than many more traditional ways of constructing theology. Process theology has several primary features: an emphasis on the developmental/process view of God, that God is not static or unchanging in all aspects, primarily in God's relationship with humanity. Process theology also accommodates a reasonable incarnation, acceptance of biblical portrayals of God (that must be, however, demythologised), and love of God for all of reality. These are often problem areas for theologians.

In my theological education, many of my professors are heavily or primarily influenced by and adherents of process theology. It makes sense that I too would have a keen interest in this topic. Having more than a passing interest, I opted to study further under the rubrics of a guided research the underlying philosophy of this theology.

Nicholas Rescher is a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburg. This particular volume is part of the SUNY Series in Philosophy. There are in fact several introductions and explanations of process philosophy (several more of which I shall likely write upon here). In the introduction, Rescher explains the importance and some of the success of process philosophy:

'Process metaphysics as a general line of approach holds that physical existence is at bottom processual; that processes rather than things best represent the phenomena that we encounter in the natural world about us.'

Rescher begins in the first chapter with an historical survey, looking at various points in ancient and more recent philosophical systems that provide seeds for process thought. He states that the true father of process thought is Heraclitus, the philosopher from the 6th century BCE, who wrote of nature as process. Plato, in endorsing Heraclitus, continues some process ideas. Leibniz, Hegel, Pierce, James, Bergson, Dewey, and Sheldon are all held up, together with Whitehead, as key to the development of process thought as it is formulated today.

'No philosophical position as such is defined by its historical exponents; it is at most exemplified by them. And, in fact, the process-oriented approach in metaphysics is historically too pervasive and systematically too significant to be restricted in its bearing to one particular philosopher and his adherents.'

One of the difficulties at pinning down process philosophy, particularly metaphysics, is that it is less of a doctrine and more of a trend, or tendency, or overarching framework.

'It can be developed in very different directions, varying with the question of what sort of process one takes to be paradigmatic or fundamental. If it is a mechanical or physical process, one sort of doctrine results (a materialism of some sort), while if it is mental or psychical, a very different sort of doctrine results (an idealism of some description).'

Rescher takes one through the key concepts and categories -- like all philosophies, it has its own vocabulary. There are different kinds of processes. There are different kinds of relationships of process with particulars, and process with universals. Particulars end up being less static items as being matrices of process, embodiments, as it were. Universals is a tricky problem for metaphysics generally -- in process, universals are generally demoted from the lofty heights a Platonic framework might give them and put into the processes themselves.

Rescher continues from these basic chapters to developing ideas about process and nature, process and persons, process logic and epistemology, and process views of scientific inquiry. However, it is to the final two chapters, Process Theology and Process in Philosophy, that I wish to devote more attention.

In Process Theology, Rescher frankly states the situation that not all process philosophers care about theological ideas. God is seen less as a substance (with all the problems that that view entails) and more of a process. However, God is not part of the physical processes of the world. There is no easy way of visualising God's participation in the world, not being of the world, but there is an interconnectedness, and the issue of how is, according to Rescher, secondary.

'Even apart from process philosophy, various influential theologians have in recent years urged the necessity and desirability of seeing God not through the lens of unchanging stability but with reference to movement, change, development and process.'

God is not a God of mighty acts and deeds in process thinking. God is rather a persuasive force. God does not act directly in the world in a substantive way, but rather in a processual way. God as a personal entity who relates to the world is made much easier to reconcile in a process framework.

'The philosophy of process is also a philosophy in process.'

What is the bottom line with process philosophy? Largely, it is the same as the bottom line with any philosophical system. Can it make sense? Does it explain the details as well as possess a coherence that is rational? How can process philosophy, a philosophy that changes, possess such coherence? Rescher resists the urge to set out a 'decisive, knock-down drag-out argumentation' whose power of persuasion would be 'somewhere between miniscule and nonexistent.' He does, however identify many of the key problems with substance philosophical systems and the smooth and promising fruits of process thinking, not least of which are its compatibility with modern social, scientific, and theological ideas.

This book by Rescher is not for the casual reader. For the advanced undergraduate or graduate student who has at least some background in philosophy, this is a good introduction. Some of the chapters require specialised knowledge -- Rescher's explanation of the difficulties of substantialism in chapter three on particulars employs logic formulae with no explanation; those without training in elementary symbolic logic will likely get lost in this discussion. However, for those who are getting deeper into philosophy or theology, this book will be enlightening and interesting.

This book did a wonderful job of expounding the basics of process metaphysics with the angle of showing how process philosophy avoids many of the problems that plague substance metaphysics. Particularly it is shown that first not all processes are merely the actions of well defined 'things' (vibrations in a magnetic field, for example) with a certain essence. Second, processes are shown to be just as fundamental as 'essential things',if not more. In fact, Rescher is probably a little too forgiving to the essentialist view. The quantum mechanical world, the most basic in physical reality, is comprised entirely of processes, not well defined 'things'.

Rescher explains also how Whitehead seemed to somewhat cave into the essentialist view by positing 'actual occasions' as basic units of process akin to the atomist view of substance metaphysicians. Rescher tells us that there is no need to posit these basic processual units, but we can go even further than that: empirical evidence would suggest that such units do not exist. With what we know from QM, it appears that the world is held together by processes, illustrated by quantum mechanical wave functions, 'all the way down' with no discernable basic processual unit (and furthermore, might the insertion of something basic, be it a process or a 'thing', contradict the spirit of QM itself?). Rescher thinks that by adopting this view which is more at home with Sheldon (and Teilhard de Chardin) and later process thinkers, process metaphysics rests itself on even more solid foundations.

After reading this book it has become difficult for me to read even Paul Tillich who's otherwise interesting theology is couched in the Platonic language that seems so horribly archaic now. The implication of this would be that Plato and Aristotle (and thus the entire Western tradition) just plain got it wrong about metaphysics and have led us on a wild goose chase to prop up an outlook about the 'first things' that was doomed to fail. It has only been thanks to the cunning insights of Hume and Kant and, even more, the discoveries of science that many philosophers have given up on substance metaphysics and see a process perspective as the only one that could work (if any do). Rescher also speaks very highly of Henri Bergson as prototypical process philosopher which is interesting considering that Teilhard thought so highly of him.

The world is as it appears to be through our senses - Every event has an explanation - That explanation is intelligible - There are absolute realities and it is these that science "gets back of". These are some of the assumptions of science. The question of course is how many of them can really be answered apart from specuation.

Nicholas Rescher, in a clearly written, tersly laid out, and cogent book ventures into some of these questions and ventures answers grounded in Peircean (Popperian?) pragmatism. The reason we believe the above presumptions - and presumptions is what they are - is that they enable us to do science at all. Tautology, you say? How can Rescher claim that doing science is why we make these assumptions if these assumptions are (at least partially) necessary to do science? In the tradition of pragmatists Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey, we do science to gain increased control over our environment (even if that control is just more security of knowledge) and it is that end which causes us to make assumptions like these that help us in our pursuit.

Rescher demonstrates, as far as metaphysics will allow, that it is pretty well certain that some of the above assumptions are false. There's no reason, for instance, to suppose that ultimate truths exist; that is to say, that even though we can state facts and seemingly true theories about x, spaitally, x is likely able to divide into smaller units and they into smaller units ad infinitum. Thus, search for scientific knowledge must (will?) be a never ending one. Similarly, scientific realism which asserts that scientific theories describe things as they "really are" is questionable. Our view of the world changes with time; it always has. None of this is to suggest that there is no true reality or that science can get no closer by degrees of describing the world; just that the end goal will always be an end goal.

Rescher's view is of a realistic pragmatism; science is judged by utility. We use our theories because they work, they help us predict, and becasue of this they are the truest we have. Far from the "vulgar pragmatism" of Rorty or Fish which, to a degree, disavows reason as just another way of knowing, Rescher's view of science makes reason that much more important. As fallible, limited beings, it seems the best tool we have.

My only complaint is that for those familiar with these issues, this book may come off as repetitive. Indeed, about half way through, I found myself guessing, rightly, what the author would say next. All in all, a fairly easy, yet very enlighening read. In addition, I would also reccoment Popper's "Conjectures and Refutations" and Susan Haack's "Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate".

The title of this review is false.

I love paradoxes. A good paradox is something like an incongruity in the structure of the Matrix, an indication that there's something not quite right about our take on reality. Jorge Luis Borges even took paradoxes as evidence of monistic absolute idealism -- proof that the "undivided divinity operating within us" had "dreamt the world" but left in a few "crevices of unreason" so that we could tell we were dreaming. ("Avatars of the Tortoise," in _Labyrinths_.)

I also love Nicholas Rescher's books, of which he's written many. This one is very, very good.

Every time Rescher writes a book, it seems, he founds (or at least names) a new discipline. This time it's "aporetics," the study of paradoxes and their resolution. (An "apory," Rescher says, is a "group of acceptable-seeming propositions that are collectively inconsistent" [p. 7].)

Rescher studies a _lot_ of paradoxes in this volume. Even if you're interested in it only as a sort of bestiary of paradoxes, you'll be impressed by the sheer number of the things he's managed to include. He's combed the philosophical literature from the present day on back through the European Middle Ages clear to ancient Greece. And I'm willing to bet that he didn't miss any of importance.

But what's actually supposed to be new here is Rescher's method for dealing with paradoxes. So let's chat about that.

First of all, Rescher spends some time discussing the difference between truth and plausibility. His point here is that paradoxes become resoluble if we break them out into propositions, each of which is under consideration as a _candidate_ for truth, but which we can decide to reject if we like. In an aporetic analysis, the propositions in an "aporetic cluster" may have a _presumption_ of acceptability (if they're plausible, which they probably are or we wouldn't have a paradox) but we don't just assume indefeasibly that they're all true.

Now, when we get down to cases, what we do is this: when we encounter a paradox/apory, we break it down into a set of propositions that give rise to the paradox. Then we sort the propositions according to their degrees of plausibility. Then, based on the resulting "retention prioritization," we decide which one(s) to reject. There are some complications here but that's the skinny of it.

How far does this take us? Well, frankly, what it's doing is giving us a useful and organized way to _think_ about paradoxes (which of course is no small thing), but not necessarily a method for actually resolving them.

First, as Rescher himself acknowledges, different people may have different "retention prioritizations" (as in the "Paradox of Evil," p. 31, about which, Rescher says, religious believers and committed atheists would presumably disagree). This fact alone means that in lots of controversial cases, Rescher's method will generate different results for different people.

Second, and arguably more seriously, it's not altogether clear that different people will break a paradox out into exactly the _same_ set of propositions. On the contrary, I would have thought that actually _finding_ this set of propositions would have been a major subdiscipline of aporetics. But Rescher essentially hands us these on a silver platter and tends to presume that there's no question about how to arrive at them.

Third, and probably _most_ seriously, even when we're through with our aporetic analysis, we still may not have satisfactorily resolved our paradox! I'll illustrate with the "Liar Paradox," which Rescher discusses in his tenth chapter.

The "Liar Paradox" arises, of course, from the statement "This statement is false" -- which seems to be true if it's false and false if it's true. Rescher resolves it by breaking it out into a set of propositions that includes this one: "S [the Liar statement] is a semantically meaningful statement -- that is, it is either true or false and not both." His "retention prioritization" concludes that this is the one to reject; the Liar statement must be dismissed as "semantically meaningless" [p. 202].

This is all well and good; at the very least, that proposition is almost undoubtedly the place at which to concentrate one's philosophical fire in an analysis of the Liar Paradox. But does Rescher's analysis really _resolve_ the paradox?

I think it does not. Not all readers would agree (I don't) that "semantically meaningful" is identical in meaning to "either true or false and not both"; indeed, if Rescher had broken _this_ proposition out separately, I might have regarded _it_ as the one to reject.

Which means that the paradox hasn't really gone away. Indeed, the engine that drives it seems to be our very sense that a statement _can_ be semantically meaningful and yet fail to be decisively true or false. For surely the heart of the paradox is precisely that we _can_ tell what the Liar statement means well enough to recognize that it is self-referring and self-undermining (or, in Rescher's marvellous coinage, "self-counterexemplifying" [p. 194]). We may very well have to dismiss it as semantically meaningless after all -- but the paradox hasn't been resolved until we know _why_. Rescher's method, even if fully sound, would tell us only _that_ we should do so.

This isn't a fatal flaw, so long as we don't expect to use Rescher's aporetic analysis for more than it can do. As a method of organizing our thoughts when we sit down to think through a paradox, it's very, very good. It's just not complete (and probably isn't supposed to be) as a method for actually figuring out what makes a paradox tick and what we should do about it.

If you enjoy paradoxes even a tenth as much as I do, you'll like this book.

If you're just starting to investigate the subject, I recommend William Poundstone's _Labyrinths of Reason_ and Mark Sainsbury's _Paradoxes_ as introductory volumes. Eventually you'll also want to get around to Barwise and Etchemendy's book on the Liar Paradox, Raymond Smullyan's books, Douglas Hofstadter's _Goedel, Escher, Bach_, and Rudy Rucker's _Infinity and the Mind_, and a host of others.

I should preface my comments by explaining that, while I have plans to pursue a Ph.D. in political theory, I am currently a mere undergraduate!

At any rate, I too found much to like in Professor Rescher's text. He provides a much welcome counterpoint to those who seek to imbue consensus with a normative value that it just may not possess. (See especially the new works in international relations theory that make extraordinary claims for 'global civil society'...) As a student with substantive interests in environmental politics, I find his outline of objectivity to be valuable. (Consider for a moment the problems of pursuing a poststructural environmental politics!)

-----------------

I found Rescher's criticism of Alasdair MacIntyre's "Whose Justice - Which Rationality" somewhat ironic. For just as Rescher complains that MacIntyre "needs to take a deep breath and move forward...", in my view so does Rescher.

As with his "Plurality: against the demand of consensus" (from which Professor Rescher liberally borrows in "Objectivity"), I find that Rescher's text ends just as it really starts to become interesting.

Rescher's treatment of pluralism between societies is useful. A helpful addition, though, would have been a treatment of pluralism within societies. Rescher's pluralism seems to lead one directly into the quintessentially liberal problem of the limits of toleration. It would have been beneficial for this reader had Professor Rescher followed his line of analysis to the end and addressed this issue.

Still, the measure of a good book is not the degree to which one agrees with it but rather the amount of thought that it provokes. For this reader, Objectivity was time and money well invested.

Nicholas Rescher, probably the single most prolific author among contemporary philosophers, here provides a sturdy defense of objectivity based on the primacy and inevitability of practical reason.

His concern here is with _epistemic_ objectivity -- that is, "not with the _subject matter_ of a claim but with its _justification_." What such objectivity calls for, he contends, is "not allowing the indications of reason, reasonableness, and good common sense to be deflected by 'purely subjective' whims, biases, prejudices, preferences, etc." As he is at pains to show, objectivity does not rule out personal values and commitments; indeed, if it did, there would be no hope of our achieving it, as "[t]he 'God's-eye view' on things is unavailable -- at any rate to us." On the contrary, being "objective" is a matter of proceeding, he says, "how we _should_ -- and how reasonable people _would_ -- proceed if they were in our shoes in the relevant regards."

Objectivity hinges on rationality -- as a matter not simply of logical coherence, but also "of the intelligent pursuit of circumstantially appropriate objectives." From its requirements follows a sort of "rational economy," the principles of which are very obviously objective and universal although they may (and do) have different applications in different situations.

On this foundation, Rescher takes on a host of contemporary critics of objectivity -- anthropologists, historicists, sociologists of knowledge, personalists, feminists, Marxists and class-interest theorists, post-modernists, and social activists. He finds that each attack on objectivity involves a misconstruing of what it is all about, and devotes the remainder of the volume to showing why this is the case.

Space will not permit a summary of the following ten chapters, in which Rescher deals by turns with various sorts of relativism, places cognitive objectivity on a ground of ontological objectivity, and argues that the "self-reliance of rationality is not viciously circular" -- objectivity and rationality are self-supporting in a _virtuously_ circular fashion.

As always, Rescher's presentation is clear and cogent. It will be of interest to a wide class of philosophical readers, and also to one other class I shall single out for special mention.

Pseudophilosopher Ayn Rand was pleased to name her own pseudophilosophy "Objectivism," in the incorrect belief that she had actually arrived at a genuine understanding of objectivity. In fact she had done no such thing, and Rescher's work on one particular sort of objectivity is a sure cure for readers who have been infected by her own subjectivism.

(I'm singling the Randroids out because somebody is going through all my reviews and clicking "Not helpful" on any in which I say anything negative about Rand. Click away, you objective Objectivist, you!)

Enjoyable and amusing yarn on the subject of luck! Interesting how some people view their success as a result of their hard work or background while it just might have been that they were lucky? And others were just plain unlucky. Not sure if luck can really be managed according to the author? Sometimes luck just happens!

Philosophy lends itself to the discovery of, and arguments over, Great Questions. For instance, the Question of Evil--how does evil exist in a world created by an all-powerful, all-good Creator?--has been debated for centuries since its discovery by early Christian thinkers.

Much of Mr. Rescher's book is an engaging, well-researched series of observations about the role of luck in human affairs, many of which are used to make the frequent point that nothing is 'responsible' for the operation of luck. "Luck pivots on unpredictability," says the author, and backs this up with both historical and hypothetical events in which fate acts in defiance of what its object deserves--either for good or ill.

Yet in making these points, the author either avoids or ignores larger questions that naturally follow from his examples. While he observes that chance frowned upon the passengers of the Titanic and the Jews of World War Two-era Poland, he avoids the related observation that chance frowned more heavily upon the poor passengers and Jews than upon the wealthy and influential. The author defends as rational the impulse to buy a lottery ticket, since a chance at a fortune is better than no chance, yet he ignores that a person who is already wealthy has no need of this fortune, and thus feels no such 'rational' urge.

About two-thirds of the way through the book, the author considers that individual traits bestowed or withheld by luck might have some moral significance, yet--in a tone that seems directly the opposite of the book's previous chapters--he satisfies himself with an oddly bourgeois rule: we are responsible for our moral virtue, regardless of how much of that virtue has been chosen for us by luck or fate. The author wants to insist on this rule so that villains can be condemned for being villains before they perform any wicked acts. Yet this seemingly common-sense position leads to a far more puzzling question: to what degree can one reasonably separate chance from intent? The author points out that a drunk driver who gets home safely is lucky, while a sober driver who kills another motorist by accident is unlucky, but does this distinction of luck really make the drunkard more morally reprehensible than the killer? What if the sober driver was an alcoholic, but had simply not had the chance to get drunk?

The toughest questions arise when the author sternly observes that "We are not morally responsible for _choosing_ our bad character (character is not the sort of thing that is up for choice), but we are morally responsible--and morally reprehensible--for _having_ it." If we are somehow responsible for having bad character chosen for us, are we also responsible for bad circumstances chosen for us? Is a poor child somehow morally responsible for being born into poverty rather than wealth? "Identity must precede luck," states the author. But where environment informs identity, and luck informs environment, can such a statement remain true, if it ever was?

What the author ends up doing in this book is brushing the snow away from around a Great Question: how is justice possible in a world where chance is the predominant force for action? By failing to consider this question and the lesser questions that attend it, Mr. Rescher's book, while enjoyable, remains less than what it could have been.

The author explains why luck is an inescapable ingredient in human life. He makes clear that this random ingredient is essential if we are to conceive of ourselves as having free will. He eases concerns that bad luck is somehow the result of lack of worthiness and verifies that good luck often is experienced by unsavory people. He establishes that, by its very nature, luck is not controlled by other characteristics or occurrences of our lives, but there are things we can do to fully benefit from the good luck that we do have.

The monadology on the whole needs no introduction, but this book brings lucidity to some of the more peripheral problems facing Leibniz esp. the relativistic theory of space and time. Ensure you have read elementary logic in the form of Guttenplan or Hodges.

Leibniz' "Monadology" offers a deeply thought out alternative to the physicalist world view implicit in Galileo and the mechanistic side of Descartes. Leibniz outlines a fascinating and distinct view of the relationship of mind and body, the nature of organisms, and the nature of the universe. Rescher's edition is nothing short of spectacular, offering elaboration of each proposition in the "Monadology" with extensive quotes from Leibniz' other works, as well as his own commentary. This edition is one of the best available ways of becoming acquainted with Leibniz' thought and with the substantive issues involved. Readers who find this book interesting might also enjoy reading Heidegger's commentaries on Leibniz in his book "The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic." Here Heidegger is at his best, offering detailed textual exegesis and a sincere attempt to find the inner logic of Leibiz' thought.

Leibniz was a master of logical thinking and metaphysics. Leibniz envisioned the "Monadology" as a precise argument and elucidation of his metaphysical system. It is almost universally agreed upon that he is among the top theistic philosophers to ever live. Intelligent people should be able to see this, iff they are not blinded by dogma und superstition. I myself believe in no God of the kind Leibniz describes, however he, with Rescher's help, brings me to question this belief more than any other writer I have read. Rescher does a very comprehensive job supplamenting "The Monadology" and his comments should be of help for students and philosophers alike.

I was enthused to discover this book when I did because it appeared to present complexity at precisely the level I was hoping for: as a philosophical and practical concept not necessarily dependent upon difficult mathematics or theory. I dove in, and it was fairly challenging reading. The tragedy of this book is that the topics and many of ideas offered-up appeal a great deal to my intellect, but the astonishingly poor editing is a significant distraction. There are cases of material repeated verbatim, painfully obvious typographic errors, and an insufficient degree of conciseness overall. It seems as if the book was under-funded, over-rushed or simply assigned the wrong editor. It is indeed a shame, since discussions such as why the growth of science may not have an inherent limit, but may be limited by resources are interesting. I also enjoyed the taxonomy of complexity. It has allowed me to consider, with greater subtlety, the complexity in the systems with which I work, and alternatives to manage it. I would give the ideas in this work 4 or 5 stars, but the lack of effective editing make this a difficult read.

Instead, I just want to give you information about a "misprint" in his book: Unfortunately, on page 164, note 6 a paper of mine is cited incorrectly.

The corrected source is:

Theodor Leiber "Chaos, Berechnungskomplexität und Physik: Neue Grenzen wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis?" Philosophia Naturalis, vol. 33 (1996), pp. 23-54

With best regards

Theodor Leiber

A few years ago H. O. Mounce wrote a similar book entitled _The Two Pragmatisms_ in which he argued--much like Rescher does here--that pragmatism took a wrong turn when James got ahold of it and that the only means for rescuing pragmatism from Rorty's antirealist deathgrip is to return to a Peircean form of pragmatism that embraces metaphysical realism and shuns Rortian relativism.

That one has already to be a metaphysical realist in order to derive this reading from Peirce I will not argue here. However, I do wonder how the self-respecting metaphysical realist deals with Peirce's own claims to be both a "Scotian realist" and an "objective idealist." Are these claims somehow reconciled in arguing that what Peirce means by both of these terms is late twentieth century metaphysical realism? I think not.

Further, Rescher draws the reading out of James that he does and thus the contrast with Peirce that he desires through some crafty quotation. For example, when quoting James's famous statement from _Pragmatism_, "The true is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in our way of behaving" (Rescher, 16) Rescher fails to follow James's thought into the next sentence, which adds the proviso, "expedient in the long run and on the whole of the course" (James, 106.) Thus, Rescher is able to claim that Peirce's commitment to "the ongoing long run allegiance of a community committed to the methods that successfully implement the goals of science" (Rescher, 12)is neglected by James. This is but one example of Rescher's many attempts to draw broad distinctions between Peirce the Good and James the Bad throughout the book.

Although my familiarity with Dewey is not as great as with James, what acquaintance I do have with Dewey leads me to believe that Rescher's account of Dewey's thought is equally skewed in the interest of making pragmatism palatable to the metaphysical realist.

Now, I would not deny that there are distinctions among Peirce, James, and Dewey, but Rescher's work paints with such broad strokes that the distinctions become unbridgeable chasms rather than interesting philosophical debates. Rather than refuting Rortian readings of James and Dewey and drawing a line of thought out of pragmatism different than that given us before, Rescher offers us another reading of early American pragmatism that reiterates an old mantra, "Peirce, good; James and Dewey, bad." Unfortunately, instead of being an interesting study in American pragmatism, this book is yet another perpetuation of just the kind of reading Rorty (as Rescher's apparent nemesis in this book) gives of American pragmatism. The only real difference here is that Rescher likes what Rorty dislikes and vice versa. In the end, it is difficult to see much difference in thesis between this and Mounce's book and to see much new in this reading of pragmatism.

Despite his uncannily high volume of scholarly output, Nicholas Rescher is incapable of writing a bad or uninteresting book. And there is much of great interest in _Realistic Pragmatism_.

There are some minor difficulties which have to do more with the editorial process than with the content. First of all, the book seems to have more than its share of spelling and grammatical errors. (Some more or less typical examples: "Hypotheses" is given a singular verb on p. 6. On p. 251 we encounter the following sentence: "And so, while a pragmatism of limited objective (be it cognitive or psychological or social) makes perfect sense in its own domain, but that nowise entitles it to claims of predominance -- let alone sufficiency or exclusivity -- across the board." And the name of Susan Haack is consistently misspelled "Haak" -- rather surprisingly, since Rescher regards her as an ally in his battle for a "pragmatism of the right.")

Moreoever, Rescher, usually a fine writer, is at his most awkwardly Latinate throughout much of this volume and occasionally lapses into prose that would be at home on the overhead projector in a business management seminar. (For example, we are told on p. 11 that owing to biological evolution, Charles Sanders Peirce's pragmatic view of truth is "comprehensively coordinated to effective implementation." For my taste, at least, there is altogether too much of this sort of thing.)

These minor stylistic annoyances aside -- and that is all they are -- Rescher has written a very thought-provoking book here. His basic goal is to rescue pragmatism from some modern and post-modern philosophers who have adopted that rubric (mostly Richard Rorty). In order to further this goal, Rescher wishes to distinguish firmly between a hard-minded "pragmatism of the right" (which he favors) from a woolly "pragmatism of the left" (which he wishes would go away).

And so he sets out to defend pragmatism against a host of real and hypothetical foes. He argues by turns that his brand of methodological pragmatism has something useful to say about scientific inquiry, the philosophy of language, and the pursuit of value (and not merely "crass materialism," which seems to be a bogey of Rescher's); that pragmatism is not in any way an enemy of metaphysical realism or a friend of subjectivism or relativism; and -- especially -- that pragmatism took a wrong turn under the management of William James and should make pilgrimage back to its Peircean roots.

He actually begins with this last, and his thesis here underlies most of the book. In a footnote on p. 9, for example, he notes that "one point that separates [Peirce] from William James" is that Peirce identifies the meaning of a conception with what follows from its _truth_, not with what follows from _believing_ it is true. This is apparently supposed to be the watershed that irrevocably divides the pragmatism Rescher favors from the wrongheaded perversions of Rorty et alia.

Unfortunately Rescher seems to me to be on very weak ground here. Constantly reminding us that pragmatism bases itself on success in practical action, he seems to lose sight of the fact that even in Peirce's hands, practical success tends to be identified with things with which it is simply not identical.

For example, Peirce's essay "How To Make Our Ideas Clear" (cited by Rescher in the aforementioned passage) does indeed tell us that the meaning of an idea consists of what would follow from it if it were true. ("Our idea of anything," Peirce writes, "_is_ our idea of its sensible effects.") But this is actually a liability.

In what seems to be his eagerness to scotch metaphysical speculation, Peirce has set out to deal with ideas and beliefs in the same manner, and yet has also told us that to clarify a _belief_ (as opposed to an idea) we are to consider the consequences, not of the belief's object, but of our taking the belief to be true. James may well have given this latter portion of Peirce's "pragmaticism" too much weight, but _that_ he found this doctrine in Peirce is hardly in question. If anything, he adopted it with greater consistency than Peirce himself did.

At any rate, Peirce's own formulation, even as regards ideas, rests on a confusion (and one which heavily influenced logical positivism's misbegotten "verifiability theory of meaning"). For the _consequences_ of a particular state of affairs are surely not identical with the state of affairs itself; the meaning of an idea is to be found, not in something which follows from the idea's object, but in the object itself. As Brand Blanshard phrased it with characteristic wit, Peirce's claim here is in effect that "to think clearly about something, the best way is to think about something else" [_Reason and Analysis_, p. 196].

Despite Rescher's tremendous acuity, I do not see that his defense of Peirce manages to clear up this fundamental confusion -- nor, therefore, ultimately to justify his claims for "methodological" pragmatism (which, in this volume at least, seem to consist mainly of telling us in general terms what pragmatism could or should do rather than actually telling us how to go about it).

Nevertheless, Rescher's volume is generally a goldmine of helpful insights and provocative suggestions. I have long thought that Rescher is at his very best in getting clear on foundational issues, making basic distinctions, and setting up helpful classification schemes. There is quite a bit of that in this book, and it is characteristically clear and well constructed even if it does not quite meet Rescher's usually high standards of expository prose. In this sense the book is a clear success on its own terms: whatever we think about its metaphysical foundations, its contributions to practical reason are undeniable.

Readers who are interested in Rorty's relation to pragmatism (and especially to Peirce) might also enjoy Susan Haack's _Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate_, in which (along with much else) Haack presents an imaginary dialogue between Rorty and Peirce consisting of contrasting excerpts from the writings of the two men.

As always, the incredible prolific philosopher Rescher writes thoughtfully and well about an important topic. I have enjoyed several of his previous books. On this particular topic, however, I happen to have know of a large decision-theory literature on the irrationality of "agreeing to disagree" which suggests that Rescher is just wrong. While Rescher says that the variety of human circumstances implies that we must inevitability draw diverse conclusions, the agreeing-to-disagree literature shows how disagreement must disappear once one takes full account of the information implicit in the opinions of others. In 1976, for example, Aumann first showed this (in the Annals of Statistics) for Bayesians with common priors. Of course Rescher might reasonably disagree with this literature, but his book suggests that he is just completely unaware of it.

The best thing about the book is the title. The author discusses in length some obvious limitations on forecasting which exist simply because we are finite beings. But Rescher's formulation of this quite trivial fact sounds as follows: "the predictive venture of securing rationally warranted foresight into the future therefore faces rather equivocal prospects." (p.245) Now, this quote is representative of Mr. Rescher's heavy academic style.

I completely agree with the Finnish reviewer regarding the lack of depth in any subject and example discussed. Rescher's books on Idealism are much better -- my guess is because he is an Idealist and enjoys writing on the subject. Reading this book however I felt that the author just had to finish writing it as a business duty to his publisher.

Rescher is an internationally known professor of philosophy, not a business guru who earns his living by selling " Predicting the future" -seminars. This is partly good news, partly bad news.

The good news is that this is a serious book. It looks at the fundamental questions about what can be firmly said about the future. Rescher deals with philosophical concepts in epistemology and ontology, and discusses underlying principles at length.

The bad news is that Rescher never discusses any concrete examples at any length; as soon as discussion starts to get interesting, it is time to take a new viewpoint. There are plenty of interesting topics which could have been discussed at more length, weather or the stock market, but one page is maximum Rescher dwells on any one topic. John Casti's book "Searching for certainty" is much better in this respect (but the book is on prediction in science only). Business predictions are much better discussed by Schnaars in "Megamistakes".

Rescher is one the co-inventors of the Delphi-method (with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey) but his discussion of the method is a dissapointment. It is very cursory, and their is a strong pet-theory bias: a 1960 Delphi study about the world in year 2000 includes, among others, predictions such as: -world population 5.1 billion -ocean farming -fusion energy -minerals extracted from oceans -regional weather control -manufacturing in the Moon -men will have landed on Mars -global ballistic transport on Earth -effective anti-missile defence -correction of hereditary defects by molecular engineering

Rescher's analysis is that "the accuracy and utility of that particular study still looks quite respectable".

Rescher has the annoying habit of using overly simplistic examples which diminish the value of his otherwise interesting discussions on fundamental principles (a philosphical educational method ?) e.g. Who will the president of the United States in 2100 ? Will there be more than three letters "e" on the front page of the Wall Street Journal tomorrow ?