Bas C. van Fraassen is one of the world’s foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science. In the latter field he is known for strongly empiricist arguments against influential forms of scientific realism. In his Terry Lecture series he sought to view religion as well as science, and the philosophical enterprise, from an empiricist point of view, arguing that empiricists should see philosophy, not as metaphysical knowledge, but as an existential stance.

The overall title for his lectures was The Empirical Stance. The titles of his four lectures were: Against Analytic Metaphysics; Empiricism as Will and Idea; Scientific Revolution/Conversion as a Philosophical Problem; and What is Science -- and What Is It To Be Secular?

Professor van Fraassen joined Princeton University’s Department of Philosophy in 1982. His interests include philosophy of science (especially subjects related to probability theory and to the foundations of physics), philosophical logic, and empiricism. His the author of An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time and Space (1970), Formal Semantics and Logic (1971), The Scientific Image (1980), Laws and Symmetry (1989), and Quantum Mechanics: An Empiricist View (1991)

Born in Goes, the Netherlands, in 1941, Professor van Fraassen immigrated with his family to Canada in 1956. He attended the University of Alberta (B.A. (Hon.), Philosophy, 1963), and the University of Pittsburgh (M.A., 1964; Ph.D., Philosophy, 1966).

He has taught at Yale University, the University of Toronto, the University of Southern California, and Princeton University.

He is editor of the Journal of Philosophical Logic and co-editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

October 1999