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Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, teaching courses in the philosophy of science, philosophical logic and the role of models in scientific practice. He previously taught at Yale University, the University of Southern California, the University of Toronto and Princeton University. He coined the term "constructive empiricism" in his 1980 book The Scientific Image, in which he argued for agnosticism about the reality of unobservable entities. Van Fraassen earned his B.A. from the University of Alberta and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh.
He is an adult convert to the Roman Catholic Church and is one of the founders of the Kira Institute. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; am overseas member of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences; and a member of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences. In 1986, van Fraassen received the Lakatos Award for his contributions to the philosophy of science and, in 2012, the Philosophy of Science Association's inaugural Hempel Award for lifetime achievement in philosophy of science.
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