Author Archives: Bas van Fraassen

Rock Mass in Adelaide

Sister Janet Mead died yesterday.   I saw it in the Guardian newspaper, just as millions of others must have seen it there.  At one time I had her record.  This was when I still had a turntable, well, a Hi-Fi with a turntable, I don’t think that even then we would have called it a gramophone.  Playing itContinue reading “Rock Mass in Adelaide”

Harvard Stars

In analytic philosophy, in my generation, it seemed that every philosophy child learned two names at her mother’s knee: Willard Van Orman Quine and Hilary Putnam.  In the way myths grow in the absence of history, Quine was the Creator of naturalism and Putnam the Destroyer of the fact-value distinction, and they lived on Harvard Square.  Continue reading “Harvard Stars”

Death and the Maiden

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,I had not thought death had undone so many. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land Images of a maiden caught or confronted or taken unaware by death, depicted as a skeleton, seem to have been everywhere in the Renaissance.  All purport to remind us that beauty and youth are fleeting,Continue reading “Death and the Maiden”

The Gentle Art of Parody

…. and its failures Peter Singer is much to be admired, for all the good he has done for animal rights and welfare.  But he encountered much hostility, not for his naïve utilitarianism (let’s draw a veil, shall we?) but for his reasons for not eating animals. Some of the criticism in the German-speaking countries tended towardContinue reading “The Gentle Art of Parody”

Etruscan Places

Etruscan Places The Etruscans are a mystery, although the Romans’ drastic ethnic cleansing still left clues.  There are tombs, frescoes, smiling sculptures, vivid with a sense of life lived differently from their conquerors.  For us, besides the tombs, there is mainly the film, Jules et Jim, with Jeanne Moreau’s Etruscan smile. In Margarite Duras’ novel The Little Horses ofContinue reading “Etruscan Places”

Ghosts in New York City

One evening in the eighties I got on a train at the Princeton Dinky Station, on my way to New York. Stepping into the compartment I saw Katherine Ramsland already there. I hadn’t seen her for a while, and thought she was teaching at Rutgers — asking about her classes, she just laughed. No, sheContinue reading “Ghosts in New York City”

Climbing, with minor fateful decisions

A fateful decision could be minor in either of two ways. It could be the sort of decision that elsewhere and elsewhen has led to tragedy, but in this particular case the actor gets off scot=free, Or it could be minor in that the decision was in itself of no great consequence, though the outcomeContinue reading “Climbing, with minor fateful decisions”

Calvino, the fragility of memory

When Calvino starts writing his memories of a battle he took part in thirty years before, he is at once in doubt. “Maybe all that’s left in my memory of the whole descent are these falls, which could equally be those of some other night or dawn.” After fourteen pages he writes “Everything I haveContinue reading “Calvino, the fragility of memory”

Grunbaum and Popper

In military history everything is explained by just two factors: mistakes and clash of egos. If historians of philosophy were less uptight I think they might do the same. For graduate school I wanted to go to Pittsburgh because I had read an article by Adolf Grunbaum, their philosopher of science. He wrote as oneContinue reading “Grunbaum and Popper”