Mario Bunge

Mario Augusto Bunge, who lived from September 21, 1919 to February 24, 2020, was an Argentine-Canadian philosopher and physicist who combined scientific realism, systemism, materialism and emergentism in a philosophical program he called exact philosophy, while becoming known for outspoken criticism of existentialism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, postmodernism and pseudoscience. He earned his doctorate in physico-mathematical sciences from the National University of La Plata in 1952, taught theoretical physics and philosophy in Argentina from 1956 to 1966, and then became the Frothingham Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at McGill University in Montreal, a post he held until retiring at age ninety. His central achievement was the eight volume Treatise on Basic Philosophy, published between 1974 and 1989, covering semantics, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of science and ethics, part of an output exceeding four hundred papers and eighty books that earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971 and the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities in 1982.