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This revised edition of his Autobiography brings up-to-date Rescher's account of his life and work. The passage of years since the publication of an autobiographical work makes for its growing incompleteness. Moreover, the passage of time is bound to bring some new perspectives to view. This new edition comes to terms with these circumstances. Since the publication of the previous version Rescher's philosophical work has made substantial progress, betokened by the publication of over a score of new books that mark an ongoing expansion of his philosophical range. Then too, the internet has brought to light interesting new information about Rescher's family background and antecedence. Overall the book affords a detailed, vivid, and highly personalized picture of the life and work of someone who counts as one of the most prolific and many-sided contemporary thinkers.

"John Stuart Mill was one of the most influential English-language philosophers during the Victorian era. His autobiography recounts his rigorous tutelage under a domineering father, his mental health crisis at age twenty, and his struggle to regain joy amid self-reflection and a reassessment of theories he once believed to be true"--

The project of my dissertation, "Autobiography", is to answer the question: How can we be free? Many philosophers describe the problem of freedom as arising from the limits of our agential powers, given the existence of other individuals and aspects of the world that might interfere with us. When thinking about it in the first person singular, it can seem that the task of the ethical and political philosopher is to figure out how to wrest freedom for each of us from the clutches of other people and from nature. In attempting to describe our complex social worlds, we may eventually arrive at some reformulation like: How can you and I both be free, at the same time, in the same place? But there is another way of framing the philosophical problem of freedom: how can we be free? When asked from the first person plural rather than the singular, our understanding of the problem of freedom shifts from asking how to rescue the possibility of each individual's freedom from being tampered with by others, to asking how to create the possibility of our collective freedom in the face of various historical forces that separate us from each other, especially those forces that enlist some of us to perpetuate the unfreedom of all of us.In chapter one, I engage with "National Liberation and Culture", an essay by Am�lcar Cabral that characterizes colonialism as a particular kind of historical unfreedom. I argue that the kind of unfreedom Cabral identifies both establishes what political freedom would look like from the first person plural perspective and provides a unified explanation of large-scale collective, individual unfreedom. In chapter 2, I turn to a discussion of conversation as a site of unfreedom in small-scale collectives as an intermediate case between individual and the kinds of collectives that involves nation states and races of people. I discuss how colonialism can meaningfully add to our descriptions of communicative dynamics, particularly how public information is used by differently socially positioned speakers. Finally, in chapter 3, I discuss individual unfreedom in a colonial social context, returning to Cabral's "National Liberation and Culture", providing considerations in favor of reworking foundational concepts in ethical theory and political philosophy like rational agency.

Nicholas Rescher was born in Germany in 1928 and emigrated to the United States shortly before the outbreak of World War II. After training in philosophy at Princeton University he embarked on a long and active career as professor, lecturer, and writer. His many books on a wide variety of philosophical topics have established him as one of the most productive and versatile contributors to 20th century philosophical thought, combining historical and analytical investigators to articulate an amalgam of German idealism with American pragmatism. The book accordingly has two dimensions, both as a contribution to German-American cultural interaction and as a contribution to the history of philosophical ideas

Introduction -- 1872-1914 -- Prologue: What I have lived for -- Childhood -- Adolescence -- Cambridge -- Engagement -- First marriage -- Principia mathematica -- Cambridge again -- 1914-1944 -- The first war -- Russia -- China -- Second marriage -- Later years of Telegraph House -- America, 1938-1944 -- 1944-167 -- Return to England -- At home and abroad -- Trafalgar Aquare -- The foundation