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Bas van Fraassen
Bas van Fraassen is a Dutch-American philosopher, and was born in 1941 in the then German-occupied Netherlands. He has a B.A. from the University of Alberta, and a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh -
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Bas van Fraaseen Life
I am a philosopher, and in recent years I have been preoccupied with two philosophical questions, one about philosophy itself, and one about science,
"What Is Empiricism, and What Could It Be?" and "What is Scientific Representation?" I've offered an answer to the first in my The Empirical Stance (2002),
and tackled the second in Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective (2008). -
Moves to Canada
Surviving the internment, Bas's father returned home after the war. At the age of 15, Bas and his family immigrated to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in the summer of 1956. In high school, his interest in philosophy began to grow. He became well read in religion, psychology, and philosophy. He highly enjoyed reading post-war Existentialists such as Sartre and Camus. Their worldview was very similar to Bas'. http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/-why-science-should-stay-clear-of-metaphysics -
Finished Undergraduate Studies in Philosophy
Most of my work as a philosopher has been in philosophy of science and in philosophical logic, but with occasional forays into philosophy of literature and the connections between art, literature, and religion. Like most philosophers (I think) I began with the ambition to arrive at a coherent view of everything -- some day, within my lifetime -- and I am still cherishing that idea ... -
Attended the University of Pittsburgh for his Ph.D.
Completed in 1966 with a dissertation on the causal theory of time that was supervised by Adolf Grünbaum. -
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I. The Philosophical Logic Phase
In the philosophical logic phase, this vision is articulated through the development of several proposals guided by techniques from philosophical logic. For instance, van Fraassen's method of supervaluations provides a way of retaining classical logic (or, at least, classical logic's theorems), even in the presence of truth-value gaps. This method can then be used to accommodate logical paradoxes, such as the Liar ("This sentence is not true"). -
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time and Space
van Fraassen, B. C. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time and Space. New York: Random House, 1970. -
"The Next Song" (story), The Fiddlehead , Number III
"The Next Song" (story), The Fiddlehead , Number III (Fall 1976): 33-35. -
Book The Scientific Image
Van Fraassen introduced his idea of constructive empiricism in his book "The Scientific Image". He reimagined empiricism in a scientific context, avoiding many of the challenges faced by logical empiricism. This was done by adopting a realist semantics. His position holds that the aim of science is empirical adequacy, where “a theory is empirically adequate exactly if what it says about the observable things and events in the world, is true”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/ -
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II. The Constructive Empiricist Period
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Empirismus im XX Jahrhundert
Course text published by the Fernuniversitaet, Hagen (Germany), 1984 -
Essay Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiricism, with a Reply by Bas C. van Fraassen
Churchland, P. M., and C. A. Hooker, eds. Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiricism, with a Reply by Bas C. van Fraassen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985. -
1986 Lakatos Award
In 1986, van Fraassen won the Lakatos Award endowed by the Latsis Foundation. It is awarded annually to somebody who has made great contribution to the philosophy of science community in the form of a book published in English within the last six years. That book was the "Scientific Image" -
Book Laws and Symmetry
The book argues that attempts to characterize the notion of law of nature are doomed to failure because either they are unable to justify the inference from It is a law that P to P, or they fail to identify the features that make P a law in the first place. As an alternative, van Fraassen suggests that many roles that traditional philosophical proposals have assigned to laws of nature can be accommodated without commitment to the latter—provided we examine the role played by symmetry . -
Book The Empirical Stance
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.Goes into detail about how "we should not, in our philosophical capacity, form beliefs about what the world contains. As philosophers, we can have stances, but not beliefs. Scientists, and other “objectifying inquirers” who restrict themselves to observing and theorizing about entities in particular domains, are entitled to beliefs. But philosophy should not try to model itself on science." https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-empirical-stance/ -
Book Quantum Mechanics: An Empiricist View.
van Fraassen, B. C. Quantum Mechanics: An Empiricist View. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. -
Existence and Explanation
Existence and Explanation, ed. jointly with W. Spohn and B. Skyrms. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991
opens the collection with some reminiscences. Naturally, one of the focal points of this volume is Lambert's logical thinking and (or: freed of) ontological thinking. Free logic is intimately connected with description theory. Bas van Fraassen gives a survey of the development of the area, and Charles Daniels points to difficulties with definite descriptions in modal contexts and stories. -
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III. The Empirical Stance Phase
The Empirical Stance Phase -
Topics in the Foundation of Statistics
Topics in the Foundation of Statistics. Ed. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. -
Possibilities and Paradox: An Introduction to Modal and Many-Valued Logic
Possibilities and Paradox: An Introduction to Modal and Many-Valued Logic (with JC Beall), Oxford University Press, 2003. -
Book Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective
The most recent book published, "Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective" presents a new way of looking at science. He considers scientific measurement outcomes as representations. In the book he mentions many paradoxes that have come up in contemporary science, as well as makes a complex analysis between appearance and reality in the scientific world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxE0RgI8U_o
Bas C. van Fraassen - Theological Epistemology: How Can We Know God? -
The Experimental Side of Modeling
2018 Isabelle F. Peschard and Bas C. van Fraassen, Editors
