19 Facts About Mario Bunge

Mario Bunge was an advocate of "exact philosophy" and a critic of existentialist, hermeneutical, phenomenological philosophy, and postmodernism.

Mario Bunge was popularly known for his opinions against pseudoscience.

Mario Bunge, who was the couple's only child, was raised without any religious education, and enjoyed a happy and stimulating childhood in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Mario Bunge lived with Marta in Montreal since 1966, with one-year sabbaticals in other countries.

Mario Bunge began his studies at the National University of La Plata, graduating with a PhD in physico-mathematical sciences in 1952.

Mario Bunge was particularly noticed there by Willard Van Orman Quine, who called Bunge the star of the congress.

Mario Bunge was, until his retirement at age 90, the Frothingham Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at McGill University in Montreal, where he had been since 1966.

Mario Bunge died in Montreal, Canada, on February 24,2020, at the age of 100.

Mario Bunge defined himself as a left-wing liberal and democratic socialist, in the tradition of John Stuart Mill and Jose Ingenieros.

Mario Bunge was a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which advocates for democratic reform in the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system.

Mario Bunge was a prolific intellectual, having written more than 400 papers and 80 books, notably his monumental Treatise on Basic Philosophy in eight volumes, a comprehensive and rigorous study of those philosophical aspects Mario Bunge takes to be the core of modern philosophy: semantics, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of science and ethics.

Mario Bunge's work is based on global systemism, emergentism, rationalism, scientific realism, materialism and consequentialism.

Mario Bunge was critical of the ideas of well known scientists and philosophers such as Karl Popper, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and Daniel Dennett.

Mario Bunge appreciated some aspects of Popper's critical rationalism but found it insufficient as a comprehensive philosophy of science, and instead formulated his own account of scientific realism.

Mario Bunge addressed issues of theory and method in the social sciences starting with his Treatise on Basic Philosophy and later in his career wrote two books entirely focused on the social sciences: Finding Philosophy in Social Science and Social Science under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective.

Mario Bunge was an advocate for what he called mechanistic explanations and defended the view that social mechanisms are processes "in a concrete system, such that it is capable of bringing about or preventing some change in the system as a whole or in some of its subsystems".

Mario Bunge was the recipient of many awards throughout his career.

Mario Bunge was distinguished with twenty-one honorary doctorates and four honorary professorships by universities from both the Americas and Europe.

Mario Bunge is in the "Science Hall of Fame" featured in Science in 2011.