Nicholas Rescher is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and former Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, a Member of the Editorial Board for The Independent Review, and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Center on Culture and Civil Society at the Independent Institute. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University, and he is former President of the American Philosophical Association, American Catholic Philosophical Association, American G. W. Leibniz Society, C. S. Peirce Society, and American Metaphysical Society.

Professor Rescher is Founder of the American Philosophical Quarterly and Honorary Member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), Royal Society of Canada, Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, he has been awarded fellowships by the Ford, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundations.

The author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated from English into other languages, plus more than 400 articles and reviews in scholarly publications, he is the recipient of eight honorary degrees from universities on three continents. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, and the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007.