His role is to foster interdisciplinary collaboration between the disciplines of the arts, social sciences and natural sciences in the fields of information science and cognitive science. Cognitive science is a young discipline involving scholarship in a range of fields including language, perception, attention, reasoning, thinking, learning and communication.

Van Benthem is an internationally recognised researcher in the field of logic and its applications. He graduated cum laude at the University of Amsterdam in 1972 and 1973 in Mathematics and Philosophy, and went on to obtain his doctorate here in 1977. He taught Symbolic Logic at the University of Groningen from 1977 to 1986, and became professor of Mathematical Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics at the UvA in 1986. He has also occupied the Bonsall Visiting Chair of Humanities at Stanford University, California since 1991. Van Benthem has been a member of the Academia Europaea since 1991, and of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) since 1992. He was founding director of the Institute for Logic Language and Computation (ILLC), the research institute at the UvA which provides a platform for collaboration between scholars in the fields of Logic, Informatics and Philosophy.