Bas van Fraassen: The Fortunes of Empiricism (Munstersche Vorlesungen Zur Philosophie)

Without doubt Bas C. van Fraassen is among the most distinguished and celebrated philosophers of science of our days. His fields of expertise range from logic and semantics to epistemology and philosophy of physics. Several of his monographs belong to the standard literature of these disciplines. It was already in 1980 when his "The Scientific Image" brilliantly entered the philosophical scene. Especially the exposition of constructive empiricism, van Fraassen's favoured philosophy of science as well as his alternative to scientific realism, launched an intensive and highly controversial debate on the aim and status of science which has not at all been settled up to now.In his Terry Lectures at Yale University (published as "The Empirical Stance" in 2002), Bas van Fraassen gave a comprehensive account of what he deems to be cogent answers to the questions of what empiricism is and what it could be. In due distance to the self-defeating fundamentalist projects of logical empiricism he envisaged empiricism as a stance, as opposed to a factual thesis. From his point of view, it is the recurrent rebellion against metaphysics and the admiration for science that characterises the empiricists' stance and buttresses their philosophical arguments. It is beyond doubt that the prospects of empiricism today are intimately related to Bas van Fraassen and his work.