Mario Augusto Bunge and Scientific Metaphysics

Abstract

Metaphysics became an exact science in 1977, the year of publication of Mario Bunge’s The Furniture of the World. Bunge, of German descent and born in Argentina in 1919, began his career as a physicist. He brought with him to philosophy the perspective of a practicing scientist (much as Buchanan came into political philosophy as an economist), and his chief goal is to develop a philosophy that is compatible both with the current body of science and with the ways scientists go about their work. While philosophers continue to debate the existence of external reality and the possibility of human knowledge, scientists proceed to learn about that reality.