Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift

This volume has 41 chapters written to honor the 100th birthday of Mario Bunge. It celebrates the work of this influential Argentine/Canadian physicist and philosopher. Contributions show the value of Bunge’s science-informed philosophy and his systematic approach to philosophical problems.

The chapters explore the exceptionally wide spectrum of Bunge’s contributions to: metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, medical philosophy, and education. The contributors include scholars from 16 countries.

Bunge combines ontological realism with epistemological fallibilism. He believes that science provides the best and most warranted knowledge of the natural and social world, and that such knowledge is the only sound basis for moral decision making and social and political reform. Bunge argues for the unity of knowledge. In his eyes, science and philosophy constitute a fruitful and necessary partnership. Readers will discover the wisdom of this approach and will gain insight into the utility of cross-disciplinary scholarship. This anthology will appeal to researchers, students, and teachers in philosophy of science, social science, and liberal education programmes.

1. Introduction

Section I. An Academic Vocation (3 chapters)

Section II. Philosophy (12 chapters)

Section III. Physics and Philosophy of Physics (4 chapters)

Section IV. Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind (2 chapters)

Section V. Sociology and Social Theory (4 chapters)

Section VI. Ethics and Political Philosophy (3 chapters)

Section VII. Biology and Philosophy of Biology (3 chapters)

Section VIII. Mathematics (3 chapters)

Section IX. Education (2 chapters)

Section X. Varia (3 chapters)

Section XI. Bibliography

Michael R. Matthews is an honorary associate professor in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales. He has degrees in Science, Psychology, Philosophy, Education and History and Philosophy of Science. He has published articles, books, and edited collections in the areas of philosophy of education, history and philosophy of science, and science education. He was Foundation Editor of the Springer journal Science & Education: Contributions from the History and Philosophy of Science. He has been awarded the Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize of the History of Science Society (USA) in recognition of his contributions to the teaching of history of science. He has been President of the International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group, and the Inter-Divisional Teaching Commission of the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science.

Contributors

Joseph Agassi is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Tel Aviv University and York University, Toronto. He is Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society of Canada, and the World Academy of Art and Science; he is a former Senior Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. He has published more than 600 papers in diverse fields. He has authored 20 books and edited 10.

Evandro Agazzi is Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics  of the Panamerican University of Mexico City, and Emeritus Professor of the Universities of Genoa (Italy) and Fribourg (Switzerland). He is Honorary President, of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science (Brussel), the International Federation of the Philosophical Societies, the International Institute of Philosophy (Paris). He has published in several languages, as author or editor, more than 80 books and about 1,000 papers and book chapters.  His main fields of research are logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, general philosophy of science, ethics of science, metaphysics and bioethics

Omar Ahmad is an Internal Medicine physician and Clinical Informatics Lead at Stanton Hospital in Yellowknife, Canada. His main research interests are genetic epidemiology, clinical informatics, and biophysics. 

Richard T. W. Arthuris Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University, Canada. He researches in early modern natural philosophy and mathematics, the philosophy of physics, and scientific epistemology, specializing in the theory of time, the infinite, and thought experiments. He is author of G. W. Leibniz: The Labyrinth of the Continuum (Yale UP, 2001), Leibniz (Polity, 2014), Natural Deduction (Broadview 2011), Introduction to Logic (Broadview 2017), and over 60 articles and book chapters.

Nimrod Bar-Am is a senior lecturer at the Communication Department of Sapir College, Israel, where he headsa unit for the study of Rhetoric and Philosophy of Communication. He is the author of Extensionalism:The Revolution in Logic (Springer 2008), and In Search of a Simple Introduction to Communication (Springer 2016), as well as numerous papers.

Russell Blackford holds a conjoint research appointment at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Freedom of Religion and the Secular State (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), Humanity Enhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies (MIT Press, 2014), The Mystery of Moral Authority (Palgrave, 2016), and Philosophy’s Future: The Problem of Philosophical Progress (co-edited with Damien Broderick; Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).

Mauro A.E. Chaparro is Professor at the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas and Naturales of Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata and Assistant Researcher of the National Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina. He has published several papers on mathematicals models of gastrointestinal nematodes and magnetic monitoring. His main current interest is on geostatistics and mathematicals models of atmospheric pollution.

Alberto Cordero is Professor of Philosophy and History, City University of New York. Numerary Member of the Academie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences and of the Institute de Hautes Sciences Theoriques, Brussels. He has published extensively on philosophy of science, the foundations of physics, naturalism, scientific realism, and the philosophical history of science. He has edited Philosophy and the Origin and Evolution of the Universe (with Evandro Agazzi; Synthese Library), Reflections on Naturalism (with J.I. Galparsoro; Sense Publishers), and the forthcoming Philosophers Look at Quantum Mechanics.

Marta Alicia Crivos is a researcher at National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Argentina, and professor of Anthropological Theoretical Orientations in the Department of Anthropology at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Museum (UNLP).  She has published more than 100 scholarly works, most of them with focus on the foundations of the ethnographic methodology and the integration of this perspective in research on different issues, especially those involving the relationship between human communities and their natural environment.

Alberto Cupani is a retired Professor of the Philosophy Department at theFederal University at Santa Catarina, Brazil, and former researcher of the National Scientific and Technological Research Council (CNPq) of Brazil. He is former president of the Association of History and Philosophy of Science of the Southern Cone (AFHIC). He has published numerous articles and five books on the philosophy of science and technology. His main interests are the rationality and objectivity of scientific research, the value of science forsociety and the conditioning of human life by technology.

Pierre Deleporte is retired French CNRS researcher in biology at University of Rennes (UMR 6552 EthologieAnimale et Humaine). While his scientific work concerned mainly animal social behavior and evolution, he is also former President of the French Systematics Society. His main current interest is materialist philosophy. He translated to French several of Mario Bunge's works (including MatérialismeScientifique, Entre Deux Mondes and Philosophie de la Médecine).

Guillermo Denegri is an Associate Professor at the Department of Biology at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (UNMdP) and Principal Researcher of the National Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina. His field of study is parasitic diseases of public health importance. He gives the annual Permanent Seminar of the Biophilosophy of the FCEyN, addressed to PhD students in science. He was President of Federación Latinoamericana de Parasitología (FLAP).

Heinz W. Droste is a psychological consultant and does industry training.  He was trained as a sociologist, philosopher and psychologist at German universities. He has published a series of surveys on opinion formation strategies used in various social fields to assert political and economic interests. In addition, he has authored seven books (including Turn of the Tide - Gezeitenwechsel a semi-popular introduction to Mario Bunge's philosophy).  He is co-founder of the Public Relations-Akademie, Wiesbaden.

Olival Freire Junior is Professor of History of Science at the Federal University of Bahia and Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) in Brazil. He was elected to the council of the History of Science Society (2018-2020). He is the author of The Quantum Dissidents – Rebuilding the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics 1950-1990, Springer, 2015. His main current interest is on the history of quantum physics, history of physics in Brazil, and the uses of history and philosophy in science teaching.

Carolina I. García Curilaf is a Graduate Assistant in Philosophy of the Science at the University of Mar del Plata and scholar of the National Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina. She is a member of the research group in production, health and environment (IIPROSAM), Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. She has published about 10 papers on philosophy of ecology. Her main interests at present are the epistemological problems of ecology.

José María Gil is Independent Researcher of the National Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina and Professor of Logic at the University of Mar del Plata. He has published articles, books and chapters on linguistics, philosophy, and education.  His main interests are curriculum design in language teaching and sport education.

Rafael González del Solar is an independent philosopher and freelance translator based in Barcelona. He has conducted research and published in both ecology and the philosophy of science. As a translator, he has rendered into Spanish nine of Bunge’s works, including Chasing Reality, Emergence and Convergence, and the four first volumes of the Treatise on Basic Philosophy. He is currently in the process of translating the remaining four volumes of the Treatise and expanding his research interests to the problem of human nature.

Ibrahim A. Halloun is Professor of Physics and Education at Lebanese University. In addition to physics and education, his research interests include history and philosophy of science, and cognitive sciences and neuroscience. Throughout his career, Prof. Halloun contributed to curriculum reform in many countries around the world. Through classroom-based research, he hasdeveloped, among others, Modeling Theory in science education that evolved into Systemic Cognition and Education (SCE), a generic pedagogical framework for student and teacher education.

Art Hobson is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Arkansas, USA.  He has published Tales of the Quantum:  Understanding Physics' Most Fundamental Theory (Oxford University Press, 2017) as well as many physics papers on topics in quantum physics. He is also interested in physics literacy for the general public and has published Physics:  Concepts & Connections (Pearson, 5th edition 2010), a physics-literacy textbook for non-science college students.

Rögnvaldur D. Ingthorsson is a Researcher at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of McTaggart’s Paradox, Routledge, 2016, and co-editor of Mental Causation and Ontology, with S. C. Gibb and E. J. Lowe, OUP, 2013. He has published numerous articles addressingcentral issues in the philosophy of time, persistence, causation and truth. He is the Primary Investigator of the project Scientific Essentialism: Modernising the Aristotelian View, funded by RiksbankensJubileumsfond:Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Leonardo Ivarola is an Assistant Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and a researcher of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) and at the Interdisciplinary Institute of Political Economy (IIEP).  He has published papers in both national and international journals; has been UBACyT doctoral fellow and postdoctoral fellow at CONICE; a member of the Research Center in Epistemology of Economic Sciences (CIECE); and member of the Executive Committee of the Conference on Epistemology of the Economic Sciences.

Ingvar Johansson is Professor emeritus in Theoretical Philosophy at Umeå University, Sweden. He is author ofA Critique of Karl Popper’s Methodology (Esselte Studium 1975) and Ontological Investigations. An Inquiry into the Categories of Nature, Man and Society (Routledge, 1989; enlarged edition, Ontos Verlag, 2004).  Apart from book introductions to the philosophy of science in Swedish, he has in English (together with Prof. em. N. Lynøe) written Medicine & Philosophy. A Twenty-First Century Introduction (Ontos Verlag 2008). He has published papers on many philosophical topics in both Swedish and international philosophical journals.

Reinhard Kahle is Professor of Mathematical Logic at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal and member of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences. His main research interests are proof theory and the history and philosophy of modern mathematical logic, in particular, of the Hilbert school. His publications include also areas like Proof-theoretic Semantics, Intensionality, and Computational Complexity, and he (co-)edited ten books and special issue as, for instance, Gentzen's Centenary: The quest for consistency (Springer, 2015, with Michael Rathjen).

Byron Kaldis is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Humanities Department at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and DistingusihedXIaoxiang Professor of Ethics at the Moral Culture Institute of the Hunan Normal University, China. He works in the philosophy of science and social science, metaphysics, political philosophy, applied ethics, and the philosophy of technology. He has published articles, books and edited volumes in these areas and was the Editor of the Sage Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences.(2013) and co-editor of Wealth, Commerce and Philosophy (Chicago, 2017).

Michael Kary studied undergraduate philosophy under Mario Bunge. He received his PhD in mathematics from Boston University. He has worked in industry, taught mathematics at Dawson College in Montreal, and authored or co-authored publications appearing in diverse journals including Spine, The Journal of Theoretical Biology, and Injury Prevention.

Javier Lopez de Casenave is Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and Principal Researcher of the National Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina. His main current interest is the community ecology of ants and birds, especially in desert environments. He is former President of the Argentine Ecological Society.

María Manzano Arjona is Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Salamanca, Spain.  She has held visiting positions at California State University (Berkeley) and Stanford University.  Her publications include Model Theory (Oxford University Press), Extensions of First-Order Logic (Cambridge University Press), Lógica para principiantes, (Alianza Editorial) and The Life and Work of Leon Henkin: Essays on His Contributions (Springer).  Her pedagogical initiatives include Tools for Teaching Logic (ALFA project of UE).  

Luis Marone is Professor of Evolution and Epistemology at the University of Cuyo and Principal Researcher of the National Research Council (CONICET), both of Argentina. He was a fellow of the International Council for Canadian Studies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is interested in community ecology, and, especially, the epistemology and methodology of ecology, wildlife science and environmental sciences.

Jean-Pierre Marquis is Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Montréal. He has held visiting positions at Konstanz University, Stanford University and Université Paris Diderot. He has published in logic, philosophy of logic, epistemology, philosophy of mathematics and the foundations of mathematics. His publications include the book From a Geometrical Point of View: a study in the history and philosophy of category theory (Springer), as well as numerous papers in logic and philosophy of mathematics.

Michael R. Matthews in an Honorary Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, Australia.  He has published books, anthologies and articles in the areas of philosophy of education, history and philosophy of science, and science education.  His recent book Science Teaching: The Contribution of History and Philosophy of Science (Routledge 2015) has been published in Greek, Spanish, Korean, Chinese and Turkish.  He was Foundation Editor of the Springer journal Science & Education: Contributions from the History and Philosophy of Science. 

Manuel Crescencio Moreno completed his doctoral dissertation in Logic and Philosophy of Science under the supervision of María Manzano at the University of Salamanca. He graduated in Philosophy (specialization in “Science and Philosophy”) and in Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. His PhD thesis, entitled “Intensions, Types and Existence”, is focused on intensional logic, type theory and ontological arguments. He teaches at Cervantes School in Cordoba (Spain) and is actively involved in some research projects at the University of Salamanca.

Ignacio Morgado-Bernal is Professor of Psychobiology and director of the Institute of Neurosciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. He has been a member of the Executive Committee of the European Brain and Behaviour Society. He has published more than 100 scientific papers. In the last five years he has also developed an important activity publishing newspapers articles and books about popular neuroscience.

A. Z. Obiedat is an Assistant Professor of Arabic at Wake Forest University. He received his PhD in the area of Arab-Islamic Philosophy and Secularism from McGill University.His research specialization reflects interest in contemporary science-oriented philosophies and classical Arab-Islamic scholasticism. The common thread between the two domains is the “intellectual and political strife over modernity in Western and Middle Eastern contexts.” Studying the proposals of Bunge’s secular modernism versus Taha ‘Abd al-Rahman’s Islamic modernism is his current research focus.

Íñigo Ongay de Felipe teaches philosophy at the University Deusto in Spain and is an associated researcher in philosophy with the Fundación Gustavo Bueno.  He has had teaching positions in Mexico, China and Costa Rica.  His research covers a broad variety of issues ranging from the general philosophy of science with particular attention to the philosophy of biology and life sciences to the history of modern and contemporary philosophy.

Martin Orensanz is a Licentiate in Philosophy by the National University of Mar del Plata. He has a Doctoral Scholarship awarded by the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina, and is currently finishing his Doctorate in Philosophy. He has published several papers on different topics as well as a book on Argentine philosophy. His main interests are philosophy of science, contemporary philosophy, and Argentine philosophy.

Eduardo L. Ortiz is Emeritus Professor, Imperial College London. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics, Great Britain; Foreign Fellow of: Royal Academy of Sciences, Spain; National Academy of Sciences, Argentina, National Academy of Exact and Physical Sciences, Argentina. He has been a Visiting Professor at: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Université de Rouen, Universitéd’Orleans. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Harvard University. He received the José Babini History of Science Prize (Ministry of Science and Technology/CONICET, Argentina)

Andreas Pickel is Professor of Global Politics at Trent University, Peterborough, Canada. He has published in the areas of post-communist transformation, nationalism, and the philosophy of social science. He is the editor of two special issues of the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2004, 2007) devoted to Mario Bunge’s philosophy, in particular systems and mechanisms.

Dominique Raynaud is Associate Professor at University Grenoble Alpes, France. Among his recent books are: Sociologie des controversesscientifiques (Éditions matériologiques, 2018), A Critical Edition of Ibn al-Haytham’s Epistle on the Shape of the Eclipse: The First Experimental Study of the Camera Obscura (Springer, 2016), Studies on Binocular Vision: Optics, Vision and Perspective from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries (Springer, 2016), Qu’est-ce que la technologie? (Éditions matériologiques, 2016), Scientific Controversies. A Socio-historical Perspective on the Advancement of Science (Transaction,2015; Routledge 2017), Géométriepratique. Géomètres, Ingénieurs, architectes, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (PUFC, 2015), Optics and the Rise of Perspective (Bardwell Press, 2014).

Nicholas Rescher, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy in the University of Pittsburgh, is a much-published philosopher. He has been awarded the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Helmholtz Medal of the Berlin/Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Honorary degrees have been awarded to him by eight universities on three continents.

Andrés Rivadulla Rodríguez is a retired professor of Philosophy of Science at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Complutense University of Madrid. He has published more than a hundred articles in general philosophy of science, epistemology, methodology of science, philosophy and history of physics, philosophy and history of probability, and theoreticalstatistics. He has published or edited eight books. His current research is in the field of scientific discovery, particularly theoretical preduction and sophisticated abduction, as well as in the theoretical models of physics and scientific explanation.

Gustavo E. Romero is Professor of Relativistic Astrophysics at the University of La Plata and Superior Researcher of the National Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina. He is former President of the Argentine Astronomical Society and Helmholtz International Fellow. He has published more than 400 papers on astrophysics, gravitation, and the foundations of physics. He has authored or edited 10 books (including Introduction to Black Hole Astrophysics, with G.S. Vila, Springer, 2014 and the forthcoming Scientific Philosophy). His main current interest is on high-energy astrophysics, black hole physics and ontological problems of spacetime theories.

Peter Slezak is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of New South Wales and formerly director of the university’s Cognitive Science Centre.  He graduated in sociology, and completed his PhD in philosophy at Columbia University.  He has published in philosophy, philosophy of science, sociology of science, cognitive science, theoretical psychology and science Education.  

Marc Silberstein is an editor for scientific and philosophical publishing (Éditions Matériologiques, Paris). For years, he has helped to make known in France the thought of Mario Bunge being his main publisher. He also co-directed with T. Heams, P. Huneman, G. Lecointre, Handbook of evolutionary thinking in the sciences (Springer, 2013); with G. Lambert & P. Huneman, Disease, Classification and Evidence: New essays in the philosophy of medicine (Springer, 2013). In particular, Marc Silberstein (eds.), Matériauxphilosophiques et scientifiques pour un  matérialismecontemporain (Editions Matériologiques, 2013).

José Geiser Villavicencio-Pulido is Professor-Researcher of Department of Environmental Sciences of Universidad AutónomaMetropolitana (UAM), México. He is Member of Mexican Research System (SNI-CONACYT). He was President of Sociedad Latinoamericana de BiologíaMatemática (SOLABIMA). He has published several papers, mainly on Biomathematics. His current interests are on to issues of mathematical epidemiology.

Francisco G. Yannarella (1939-2017) was professor of Parasitology and Parasitic Diseases of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the University of La Plata, Argentina. His doctoral thesis director was Prof. J.J. Boero. Unfortunately, Dr. Yannarella died on May 1, 2017 in his hometown, Lobos, province of Buenos Aires, Argentina.  He was one of the first veterinary parasitologists who thought and approached the phenomenon of parasitism in an original and creative way.