Nature and Understanding
The Metaphysics and Method of Science

Nature and Understanding explores the prospect of looking from a scientific point of view at such central ideas of traditional metaphysics as the simplicity of nature, its comprehensibility, or its systematic integrity. Rescher seeks to describe - in a way accessible to philosophers and nonphilosophers alike - the metaphysical situation that characterizes the process of inquiry in natural science. His principal aim is to see what light can be shed on reality by examining the modus operandi of natural science itself, focusing as much on its findings as on its conceptual and methodological presuppositions. This is the culmination of many years of penetrating work in this area of philosophy by one of its most eminent exponents. It is the definitive presentation of some of Rescher's key ideas.

Introduction: Metaphysical Principles in Erotetic Perspective, 1: The Systematicity of Nature, 2: The Complexity of Nature and the Cognitive Inexhaustibility of Things, 3: Order in Nature, Multifaceted Reality, and Contextualistic Realism, 4: The Price of an Ultimate Theory, 5: Ramifications of Realism, 6: Intimations of Idealism, 7: The Intelligibility of Nature, 8: Optimalism and Axiological Metaphysics, Bibliography, Index

Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Author of more than eighty works ranging over many areas of philosophy, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984.