The Empirical Stance

by Bas C. van Fraassen

Overview

What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas C. van Fraassen, one of the world’s foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a fresh consideration of these questions and offers a program 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300103069
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	03/11/2004
Series:	Terry Lectures Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

What People are Saying About This

Paul Teller

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)

Editorial Reviews

"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."

From the Publisher

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