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The six studies comprising this volume deal with some fundamental issues in early Greek thought:  cosmic evaluation in Anaximander, the theory of opposites from the Pre-Socratics to Plato and Aristotle, thought experimentation in Pre-Socratic thought, the origins of Greek Scepticism among the Sophisists, the prehistory of “Buridan’s Ass” speculation, and the role of esthesis in Aristotle’s theory of science.  In each case the early discussion seeks to show how certain ideas bore unexpected fruit during the subsequent development of philosophical thought.

Born in Germany in 1928, Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he is also Co-Chair of the Center for Philosophy of Science.  He earned his doctorate at Princeton in 1951 in two year while still at the age of twenty-two—a record for Princeton’s Department of Philosophy.  He has served as a President of the American Philosophical Association, of the American Catholic Philosophy Association, of the American G. W. Leibniz Society, and of the C. S. Peirce Society and is currently president of the American Metaphysical Society.  An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the 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.  Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated into other languages, he is the recipient of six honorary degrees from universities on three continents, and was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984.