The Empirical Stance (The Terry Lectures) - Hardcover

Fraassen, Bas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300088744 ISBN 13: 9780300088748

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2002

Synopsis

What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas van Fraassen, contributor to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a consideration of these questions and offers a programme for renewal of the empiricist tradition. The empiricist tradition is not and could not be defined by common doctrines, but embodies a certain stance in philosophy, van Fraassen says. This stance is displayed first of all in a searing, recurrent critique of metaphysics, and second in a focus on experience that requires a voluntarist view of belief and opinion. Van Fraassen focuses on the philosophical problems of scientific and conceptual revolutions and on the not unrelated ruptures between religious and secular ways of seeing or conceiving of ourselves. He explores what it is to be or not be secular and points the way toward a new relationship between secularism and science within philosophy.

About this title

Review:

"This work argues powerfully for a radical redirection of much contemporary thinking in epistemology and other important topics. It should force all of us to rethink the nature of analytic philosophy." -- Paul Teller, author of An Interpretive Introduction to Quantum Field Theory

About the Author:

Bas C. van Fraassen is McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0300088744
• ISBN 13: 9780300088748
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288