From: M.R. Matthews (ed.) Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift, Springer, 2019. 

Professor Michael R. Matthews

School of Education, UNSW（The University of New South Wales）, Sydney 2052, Australia

Chap.1 

Mario Bunge: An Introduction to His Life, Work and Achievements  

Michael R. Matthews1 

Mario Bunge is a physics-trained philosopher who has made significant contributions to an extraordinarily wide range of disciplines.  He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on 21st September 1919. This Festschrift celebrates his one-hundred-year life, and his contributions to so many scholarly disciplines: physics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, cognitive science, and more.  In terms of longevity, productivity, and liveliness of mind, he is in the same small and exclusive league as his own philosophical hero, Bertrand Russell.  Bunge held chairs in physics and in philosophy at universities in Argentina (University of Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional de La Plata), and visiting professorships in the USA (University of Texas, University of Delaware, University of Pennsylvania and Temple University) before his appointment as professor of philosophy at McGill University in Montreal in 1966.  He held this chair, and later the Frothingham Chair in Logic and Metaphysics, until his retirement in 2009, when he became McGill's Frothingham Professor Emeritus.  He has had visiting professorships at major universities in Europe, Australasia, as well as North and South America.  He has published 70 books (many with revised editions and translations) and 540 articles (including translations).  Age has not wearied him.  After celebrating his 95th birthday in 2014, he published three books (Bunge 2016, 2017a, 2018) and a good many articles (Bunge 2014a,b, 2015, 2017b,c,d, 2019).  All titles and details are in this Festschrift's 'Bunge Bibliography'. 

1.1 Recognition 

Bunge has been awarded many prestigious fellowships and prizes.  In 1965 he received the German government’s Alexander von Humboldt fellowship for work on the axiomatic foundation of physics at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Freiburg.  In 1969 he received a Canada Council for the Arts Killam Fellowship, awarded to ‘outstanding scholars to carry out their ground-breaking projects’, the bequest aiming ‘to promote sympathetic understanding between Canadians and the peoples of other countries’.  In 1971 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, awarded for ‘exceptionally productive scholarship’.  In 1982 he became a Prince of Asturias Laureate for Communication and Humanities.  In 2014 the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (BCSSS) in Vienna awarded him the Ludwig von Bertalanffy Award in Complexity Thinking.  Bunge is one of just two philosophers in the Science Hall of Fame of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: the other is Bertrand Russell.   

Bunge’s work has been celebrated in festschrifts of 40 years ago (Agassi & Cohen 1982) and 30 years ago (Weingartner & Dorn 1990); more recently in Spanish anthologies 

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1 School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Email: m.matthews@unsw.edu.au 

(Denegri & Martinez 2000; Denegri 2014); and appraised in at least three journal thematic issues (Matthews 2003, 2012; Pickel 2004).  Bunge briefly surveyed his own life and work in a chapter in an anthology on Latin American philosophy (Bunge 2003c), and later in a wonderful and engaging 500-page autobiography Between Two Worlds: Memoirs of a Philosopher-Scientist (Bunge 2016).   

1.2 Family and Education 

The Bunge family had its origins on the island of Gotland, off the Swedish coast where the village of Bunge remains.  Ancestors moved to Unna in Westphalia, and then to Argentina in the early 19th century, soon after independence (Bunge 2016, chaps.1-2).  Bunge's father, Augusto Bunge (1877-1943), and three of his father’s eight siblings, distinguished themselves in various fields: economics, sociology, medicine, philosophy, law and literature.   

Mario’s father, Augusto, attended a Jesuit school, where he won all the prizes, but at 14 he lost the faith and became an atheist. He studied medicine, and in 1900 he graduated as a medical doctor with the gold medal. His doctoral thesis dealt with tuberculosis as a social disease, for it affected far more the poor than the rich. The Argentine government sent him to Germany and France to study public health policies. On his return, he published two thick tomes expounding the state of public health in those countries.  During his student days he joined the young Socialist Party, and in 1916 he became a Socialist congressman, an office that he held for 20 years.  In his parliamentary career he promoted several worker welfare bills, and in 1936 he introduced a national medical insurance bill whose provisions were advanced even by contemporary standards. 

Augusto and his wife Mariechen (1882-1977) created a home, El Ombú, outside the village of Florida on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.  They were avid gardeners with a 6,000m2 plot of grape vines, fruit trees, vegetables, and 130 rose varieties.  Their home was the centre for a liberal, intellectual salon including scholars and professionals from many fields.  In 1943 Augusto was briefly jailed for raising funds for the Allied war effort at a time when the government supported the Nazis; shortly after his release he suffered a stroke and died at age 66 years.  Mariechen was jailed for a month for criticising the newly installed military dictatorship (Bunge 2016, pp.69-71).  When released from jail, she had just one tooth remaining in her mouth.   

Mario’s parents wanted their son to be ‘a citizen of the world’.  From an early age he was set a demanding schedule of reading literature in six languages: Spanish, English, French, Italian, German and Latin, with Chinese read in translation.  This early multilingualism was of inestimable benefit to his education, allowing him to read the classics and the best moderns in their own words.  It also freed him from dependence on commercial, political and ideological judgements about what books would be translated and published in Spanish.  His reading of Heisenberg did not have to wait upon Spanish translations; nor his reading of the major European and Anglo philosophers, and important Enlightenment texts whose translations were prohibited in Argentina. 

One consequence of the demanding multi-lingual reading regime his parents fostered is Bunge’s critical judgement of the mono-lingual limitations of the bulk of Anglo-American scholarship.  In a critical review of a major book (1,120 pages) by Randall Collins on the sociology of philosophies—which has the less than modest subtitle of A Global Theory of  Intellectual Change (Collins 1998)—Bunge laments that Collins ignores Descartes' central scientific 

 works because 'they were not available in English translation until recently' (Bunge 1999e, p.281); that his secondary sources are all English (ibid p.280); and that he exclusively uses English translations of European philosophers even when the available translations are notoriously unreliable.  

At age twelve, he gained entry to the prestigious Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires.  The Colegio was a disappointment.  He relates that teachers ‘instilled more fear than respect’, and ‘Most of our professors were not interested in teaching, and some of them were frankly incompetent’ (Bunge 2016, p.27).  He completed his undergraduate physics degree at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where subsequently he became a professor of physics. 

1.3 Breadth and Coherence 

Bunge has been enormously productive as a researcher in physics, philosophy, social science, and other fields.  Many of his books have appeared variously in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, French, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Farsi, Romanian, and Hungarian editions.  Additionally, he has published books in Spanish and French that have not appeared in English. 

Bunge has made substantial contributions to a remarkably wide range of fields: physics, philosophy of physics, metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, medical philosophy, criminology, legal philosophy, and education.   

Beyond breadth, Bunge’s work is noteworthy for its coherence.  In the past halfcentury, the pursuit of systemic philosophy, ‘big pictures’, ‘grand narratives’ or even crossdisciplinary understanding has waned, with fewer and fewer scholars having serious competence beyond their own narrow field of research.  As Susan Haack wrote:  

Our discipline becomes every day more specialized, more fragmented into cliques, niches, cartels, and fiefdoms, and more determinedly forgetful of its own history. (Haack 2016, p.39).   

The disciplinary norm has shrunk from scientifically-informed philosophers with wide systemic concerns, to those with narrow-focus pursuits.   

Philosophers of science are usually, and understandably, just philosophers of science; it is uncommon for them to also be scientists, much less to make contributions to other areas of philosophy, and other disciplines.  The pattern of graduate studies, and the pressures of finding a position and securing tenure, fuel this move to specialization and discipline-specific research programmes; to a narrowing of the disciplinary mind.  Bunge defied this trend maintaining that: 

A philosophy without ontology is invertebrate; it is acephalous without epistemology, confused without semantics, and limbless without axiology, praxeology, and ethics.  Because it is systemic, my philosophy can help cultivate all the fields of knowledge and action, as well as propose constructive and plausible alternatives in all scientific controversies.  (Bunge 2016, p.406) 

1.4 Vocation of an Academic 

 As an academic, Bunge has had a life-long commitment not just to research, but also to the social and cultural responsibility of academics; he has never been seduced by the ‘Ivory Tower’ option, comfortable though it would have been at many stages of his life.  In other contexts, and in former ages, his version of academic commitment might be called ‘a vocation’.   

While in high school Bunge became interested in physics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, and wrote a book-length criticism of the latter.  In 1938 he was admitted to the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he studied physics and mathematics.  Shortly thereafter he founded a workers school (the Universidad Obrera Argentina).  In doing this he was inspired by the Mexican socialist and educator, Vicente Lombardo Toledano (18941968), who had established in 1936 the Workers University of Mexico (still in existence today as part of Mexico's national university system). This was quintessential Enlightenment thinking and practice about education.  The school’s effectiveness prompted its closure by the government five years later in 1943. At the time it had 1,000 students enrolled. 

In 1944, along with involvement in the UOA, Bunge founded the journal Minerva: Revista Continental de Filosofía, in order to facilitate the development of contemporary, science-informed, modern philosophy in Latin America.  It did not have just a scholarly purpose.  The first issue announced that the journal was ‘armed and in combat: armed of reason and in combat for reason and against irrationalism’.  In the subsequent 80 years, Bunge has never wavered in this commitment.  As he said in his Memoirs: 

I had the idea of organizing a sort of rationalist common front to fight irrationalism, in particular existentialism.  This pseudo-philosophy had started to rule in the Latin American schools of humanities: it rode on the fascist wave and hid behind the phenomenological veil.  (Bunge 2016, p.105) 

The Argentina of Bunge’s youth, and beyond, was a society with a conservative and reactionary Catholic church, a comfortable ruling elite, and an authoritarian, proto-fascist government that supported Hitler and maintained diplomatic relations with Germany through to 1944. It gave little support to science or to workers’ education or their rights.  Neither government nor church supported ‘free thinking’, much less critical philosophy.   

The reactionary religious-cultural-political circumstance of Argentina was pervasive throughout most of Latin America.  The USA-supported military dictatorships in Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile, set the common standard for anti-democratic authoritarianism.  The Enlightenment’s advocacy of the separation of Church and State fell largely on deaf ears of the Latin American religious, political, and economic elites.  Contraception was illegal, divorce was impossible (it was only legalised in Argentina in 1987), homosexuality was both a sin and a crime, abortion was illegal, censorship of ideas, books, films, theatre was rife, and on and on.  The Church had inordinate influence on education, including on the writing of curricula, the training of teachers, and the appointment of principals.  In many state universities, passing ‘Thomism 101’ was a condition of graduation; it was likely a condition in all Catholic universities in Latin America.  

Latin America, of course, had no monopoly on religion-based state reaction. Ireland, the Philippines, Portugal, and Spain had comparable Catholic-informed regimes. And the situation was as reactionary in all countries where Islam dominated; and of course, in the 

USSR, China, East Europe and elsewhere where Marxist ideology dominated.  In such regimes, through to the present, it was very costly for academics to make the kind of critical interventions (speeches, papers, books) that now are barely noticed in the liberal West, that take no courage and have zero career consequences.  In Bunge’s time, in Argentina, nonappointment, fines, dismissal, or jail were the common costs for liberal and socialist dissent.  He paid these prices. 

Indicative of Bunge’s sense of responsibility to the growth of knowledge is that he has always devoted time and energy to the institutions and activities required for it. Bunge has founded and edited journals and book series; he has founded and contributed to scholarly associations in at least five countries; and he has planned and hosted numerous conferences and research seminars, always along with his own constant research and publishing.  All of this ‘structural’ or academic community work is time-consuming, it does not beget research dollars or promotion, and it detracts from writing and personal time.  Few scholars have been prepared to make the required monetary, time and career sacrifices.  Bunge has. 

Alberto Cordero has given a comprehensive account of the history of philosophy of science in Latin America.  Of Bunge’s publications, translations, ‘community building’, and international impact, Cordero says: ‘No Latin American philosopher had achieved anything comparable before in cosmopolitan philosophy’. He adds that as a 

citizen of the world, perhaps the most universalist of philosophers in the subcontinent, Bunge is nonetheless very South American (it is hard to imagine him growing up anywhere else but in cosmopolitan Argentina).  (Cordero 2016) 

 1.5 Beginnings 

Bunge graduated in physics from La Plata in 1942.  In 1943 he started to work on problems of nuclear and atomic physics under the guidance of Guido Beck (1903-1988), an Austrian refugee who had been an assistant of Heisenberg in Leipzig.  Beck was the inventor of the layer model of the atomic nucleus, the first to propose the existence of the positron, and pioneered the study of beta decay.  Bunge believes Beck might have received the Nobel prize for physics had he been working in North instead of South America (Bunge 2016, p.77).  He does thank Beck for ‘teaching me not to allow politics to get in the way of my science’ (Bunge 1991a, p.524).  Bunge obtained his PhD in physics in 1952 from La Plata with a dissertation on the kinematics of the relativistic electron.  ‘My doctoral diploma did me no good, because it was not accompanied by the Peronist party card without which I could not even get a job as a dogcatcher’ (Bunge 2016, p.89).  Nevertheless, the thesis was subsequently published as a book (Bunge 1960).   

Bunge made his international philosophical debut at the 1956 Inter-American Philosophical Congress in Santiago, Chile.  He was then aged 37 years.  Willard Van Orman Quine, in his autobiography, mentions attending this congress, and the only thing about the congress that he thought worth recording was: 

The star of the philosophical congress was Mario Bunge, an energetic and articulate young Argentinian of broad background and broad, if headstrong, intellectual concerns.  He seemed to feel that the burden of bringing South America up to a northern scientific and intellectual level rested on his shoulders.  He intervened eloquently in the discussion of almost every paper. (Quine 1985, p.266) 

1.6  Systemism 

Bunge is a systemist and argues for the unity, not the disunity, of knowledge; for the need for science, social science, and philosophy to be advanced in partnership; and for science education to convey this seamless, interdependent canvas of human knowledge.  For some, Bunge is overly systemic, too precise, and ambitiously inter-connected in his writing.  But beyond this stylistic commitment, there is a philosophical commitment to systemism as an ontology, as a view about how the natural and social worlds are constituted.  Bunge has developed a philosophical system that can be characterized as: materialist (or naturalist) but emergentist rather than reductionist; systemist rather than either holist or individualist; ratioempiricist rather than either rationalist or empiricist; science-oriented; and exact, that is, built with the help of logical and mathematical tools rather than depending upon purely verbal articulation.   

Bunge’s philosophical system is laid out in detail in his monumental eight-volume Treatise on Basic Philosophy (1974-1989). Its nine individual books are devoted to semantics (one to meaning, another to interpretation and truth), ontology (one to the basic stuff or ‘furniture’ of the world, another to systems), epistemology (one to exploring the world, another to understanding it), philosophy of science and technology (one to the formal and physical sciences, another to life science, social science and technology), and ethics.  He has applied his systems approach to issues in physics, biology, psychology, social science, technology studies, medicine, legal studies, and science policy.   

Bunge points to William Harvey introducing systemism into science (natural philosophy) with his study of the heart as part of a cardiovascular system (De motu cordis, 1628); and Newton promoting systemic thinking in his postulation of universal gravitation, which led to his unification of planetary and terrestrial motions, the bringing of the heavens down to earth.  Early modern philosophers paid little, if any, attention to this scientific innovation.   

His systemism is laid out in the first volume of his Scientific Research, titled The Search for System (Bunge 1967a); the fourth volume of his Treatise, titled A World of Systems (Bunge 1979a); and in various articles (Bunge 1977a,c, 1979b, 2000a, 2014b).  In 2014, he gave a plenary talk (‘Big questions come in bundles, hence they should be tackled systemically’) at the Vienna congress of the Society for General Systems Research (Bunge 2014b), and there received the Society’s Bertalanffy Award. 

From the outset, he has been at pains to distinguish his systemism from holism.  He regards all variants of holism as more than just philosophically mistaken and obscurantist; they are politically dangerous as they give comfort to statism (Bunge 2016, p.252). 

1.7 Causation 

Bunge’s first major book in philosophy was his 1959 book Causality: The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science (Bunge 1959).  The book was recommended to Harvard University Press by Quine and reviewed favourably by the physicist-philosophers Henry Margenau and Victor Lenzen (Bunge 2016, p.127).  The book was an instant success and put Bunge, and Latin American philosophy of science, firmly on the international map.  It came out of the philosophical ‘left field’: it was among the few books ever written by Latin American philosophers of science to receive international recognition and review up to the 

1950s.  The work was translated and published in German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian and Spanish editions.  Twenty years later, a third, revised edition was published as a Dover paperback, Causality and Modern Science (Bunge 1979c).   

The book was a landmark in the subject.  For decades, under the influence of positivism and logical empiricism, philosophers had eschewed all serious investigation of causation as understood and investigated by scientists.  Outside of Thomism (Wallace 1972), the Humean picture was widely accepted: there was no causation or necessary connection in nature; there was just regularity to which the mind brought the label ‘causation’.  In Hume’s words: ‘Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects’ (Hume 1739/1888, p.165).   

Philosophers brought detailed philosophical analysis and debate to the consequences of this position, but rarely questioned its empiricist presuppositions (Sosa 1975).  Bunge brought detailed scientific knowledge of natural processes into the philosophical analysis of causation (Bunge 1961, 1962, 1982).  He mounted informed arguments against Humean empiricist and positivist accounts that made causation ‘imaginary’; accounts that replaced real-world causation with correlation; that kept the ‘causation’ label, but denied it had any ontological reference.   

Bunge also argued in detail against popular interpretations of quantum mechanics that supposedly had also consigned causation to the Humean bin.  Bunge rejected this because it was fanciful philosophy and displayed great ignorance of science.  As he wrote in Causality: 

The trend of recent science points neither to the decausation preached by positivism in favor of purely descriptive statements or uniformity, nor a return to traditional pancausalism.  Present trends show, rather, a diversification of the types of scientific law, alongside of an increasing realization that several categories of determination contribute to the production of every real event.  (Bunge 1959, p.280) 

But his work also bears upon contemporary, sophisticated non-empiricist accounts of causation.  Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson, in his Chapter 12 contribution to this Festschrift, observes that: 

Proponents of powers-based accounts [of causation] seem not to be aware of Bunge’s critique of the Aristotelian view of causation, and therefore arguably continue to build on a flawed conception of causal influence, one that is incompatible with the theories and findings of modern science. 

1.8 Theory Analysis 

Whilst visiting professor of philosophy and of physics at the University of Delaware (196566) Bunge convened a seminar on the ‘Foundations of Physics’ (Bunge 1967c).  His own opening contribution was titled ‘The structure and content of a physical theory’ (Bunge 1967d), which in turn began with this statement: 

In analysing a physical theory, we may distinguish at least four aspects of it: the background, the form, the content, and the evidence—if any.  By the background of a theory we mean the set of its presuppositions.  By the form or structure, the logico-mathematical formalism quite apart from its reference to physical objects or its empirical support.  By the content or meaning, that to which the theory is supposed to refer, quite apart either its form or the way 

the theory is put to the test.  And the evidence a theory enjoys is of course the set of its empirical and theoretical supporters.  (Bunge 1967d, p.15) 

This clear and simple fourfold division of the components of the scientific-philosophical analysis of theory represents what Bunge had been doing for the twenty years leading up to the Delaware Seminar, and what he would continue doing for the following sixty years.  He analysed theories in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, sociology, criminology and more, in terms of their background, form, content and evidence.   

（To be continued）