[3] Bouwsma attended Calvin College (1916–1919) serving, during World War I, as a member of the Student Army Training Corps.

[2][4] In his early years he was an advocate of idealism but later found the work of G. E. Moore's common sense counters to skepticism more appealing.

He developed his own technique of analysis that focused on uncovering hidden analogies driving Moore's ways of speaking about sense data.

With a leave from the University of Nebraska and a Fulbright Fellowship, he was able to spend much of the next two years discussing philosophy with Wittgenstein at Cornell, Smith College, and Oxford.

With such perennial conceptually puzzling concepts as “time,” “truth,” and “thinking,” he carefully and often humorously compared sentences of philosophers with actual sentences of daily life – earning Bouwsma a notable place in what came to be called “ordinary language philosophy.” With this reputation, Gilbert Ryle asked Bouwsma to deliver the first of the famous John Locke Lectures at Oxford University.

When called upon in philosophy to illuminate puzzling Christian concepts, he drew on his lifelong participation in the community of faith and on his reading of the Scriptures to dramatically bring to life their meaning.

His papers in the philosophy of religion are collected separately in a volume with the title, Without Proof or Evidence, published by the University of Nebraska Press.

His greatest influence came, not so much through his humorously and finely written essays, but through the many graduate students he trained in his unique style of exploring the borderlands of sense and nonsense in philosophical sentences.

[7] His papers and daily notebooks, the latter filling hundreds of legal pads, are housed in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas, Austin.

Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit Sr. co-edited and published two additional volumes of his papers and selections of his commonplace book.