Bastiaan C. Van Fraassen

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 book The Empirical Stance, and tackled the second in a book I finished anno 2008, Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective. 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 science. 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 ... Is there a general basic empiricist position within which I address philosophical questions? I have tried to address this (admittedly many-sided) question in various places, but if I am to indicate just one, it should be "Literate Experience: The [De-, Re-] Construction of Nature" (2000), which is available on the abstracts & manuscripts page on my website http://www.princeton.edu/~fraassen/