Bas C. van Fraassen
Curriculum Vitae
McCosh Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, Princeton University
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, San Francisco State University
Contact via ResearchGate
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I am a philosopher, and 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). 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 ...
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Personal and Academic History
I was born in Goes, the Netherlands, 5 April 1941, and emigrated with my family to Canada in the summer of
1956. I attended the University of Alberta (B.A. (hon.), Philosophy, 1963), and the University of Pittsburgh
(M.A. 1964; Ph.D., Philosophy, 1966).
I've taught at Yale University, the University of Toronto, the University of Southern California, and
Princeton University (since 1982). In the summer of 2008 I retired from Princeton and taught in the Philosophy
Department at San Francisco State University for eight years. There I taught joint
seminars in philosophy of science with Isabelle Peschard; we collaborated in three workshops that led to the
book The Experimental Side of
Modeling.
I have been editor of the Journal of Philosophical Logic and co-editor of the Journal of Symbolic
Logic, and active in the American Philosophical Association, the Philosophy of Science Association,
Society for Exact Philosophy, Evert Willem Beth Stichting, Association for Symbolic Logic, and the
International Union for History and Philosophy of Science.
D. Lett (hon), University of Lethbridge; LL. D.
(hon), University of Notre Dame; Ph.D. (hon), Kath. Univ. Leuven.
Foreign Member of the Koninklijke
Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences); Titular Member of
the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences; Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy; Fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
My Erdös number is 3 (Paul Erdös-Nathan Linial-Joseph Y. Halpern).
Here is my CV.
For my few non-academic publications, and for other interests (cats, rock climbing), see Personal.