Bas van Fraassen was born in Goes, in the Netherlands, on April 5. He lived in Holland until he was fifteen years old, when he moved with his family to Canada. After finishing his undergraduate studies in philosophy (with honors) at the University of Alberta in 1963, he went to the University of Pittsburgh for his Ph.D., which he completed in 1966 with a dissertation on the causal theory of time that was supervised by Adolf Grünbaum. He taught at Yale University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Southern California before moving to Princeton University, where he has been a Professor of Philosophy since 1982.

Van Fraassen has made seminal contributions to several areas of philosophy, and his work can be roughly divided into three major "periods": (i) the philosophical logic phase (1966–1979); (ii) the constructive empiricist period (1980–1993); and (iii) the empirical stance...