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Overview of Bas C. Van Fraassen
Bas van Fraassen is a philosopher born in Goes, Netherlands on April 5th, 1941. After emigrating to Canada with his family, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Alberta, and his Masters and Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh (van fraassen 2019). He's taught at various universities including Yale, Southern California, Princeton, and San Francisco State (van fraassen 2019). His works center around empiricism views in philosophy. -
Early Life
van Fraassen credits his interest in philosophy from reading Plato's The Phaedo while working part time at a library while in high school (Singh 2012).
His first book, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time and Space, was based off his lectures at Yale University and published to provide students elements in both physics and philosophy (van Fraassen 1970). The book tackles philosophical views on time, theories of space from Newton and Leibniz, and the impact of the theory of relativity. -
"Constructive Empiricism"
van Fraassen's book, The Scientific Theory, brought about an empiricism awakening by defining how the philosophical view differs in accepting scientific theories from other philosophies, especially from logical positivists and scientific realism. Constructive empiricism holds that acceptance of a scientific theory involves only the belief that the theory is empirically adequate (Monton and Mohler).
A video explaining constructive empiricism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAef_ojBYhc -
Present
van Fraassen continues to edit articles for the Journal of Symbolic Logic, American Philosophical Association, the Philosophy of Science Association, and plethora of other organizations. He runs a personal blogpost and often hikes. He was an avid rock climber at one point however his personal webpage lists his last climb back in 2017 (van Fraassen 2019).