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Princeton philosopher to present two public lectures at St. Olaf

By Amy Gage
January 9, 2005

The St. Olaf College Department of Philosophy is pleased to announce this year's Belgum lecturer, Bas C. van Fraassen, McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.

He will speak Jan. 12 and 13 at 3:30 p.m. on "Seeing and Measuring: Connecting Science to Experience." Both lectures will be held in Holland Hall 501. They are free and open to the public.

The first lecture will focus on "Representation and Perspective in Science" and the second on "The Visible and Invisible World." They will be interrelated but also understandable independently.

"For the past few years I have been preoccupied with a philosophical question about philosophy: What is empiricism, and what could it be?" he writes on his web page. "But like most philosophers, I began with the ambition to arrive at a coherent view of everything -- someday, within my lifetime -- and I am still cherishing that idea."

Van Fraassen, a leading philosopher of science, has taught at Princeton since 1982. He has also taught at Yale University, the University of Toronto and the University of Southern California. His Ph.D. is from the University of Pittsburgh.

He is editor of two journals, The Journal of Philosophical Logic and The Journal of Symbolic Logic, and is the author of more than 150 articles, primarily in philosophical logic and philosophy of science, but also in metaphysics, epistemology, art, literature and religion, including his classic Journal of Philosophy article on "Values and the Heart's Commands" and "The Peculiar Effects of Love and Desire" (in an anthology on self-deception).

He has authored six books, including the prize-winning The Scientific Image and his latest, The Empirical Stance, and is the editor or co-author of an additional six books, including the recent Oxford University Press textbook Possibilities and Paradox: An Introduction to Modal and Many-Valued Logic. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Contact David Gonnerman at 507-786-3315 or gonnermd@stolaf.edu.