Scientific Philosophy Today

This volume is dedicated to Mario Bunge in honor of his sixtieth birthday. Mario Bunge is a philosopher of great repute, whose enormous output includes dozens of books in several languages, which will culminate with his Treatise on Basic Philosophy projected in seven volumes, four of which have already appeared [Reidel, I 974ff. ]. He is known for his works on research methods, the foundations of physics, biology, the social sciences, the diverse applications of mathematical methods and of systems analysis, and more. Bunge stands for exact philosophy, classical liberal social philosophy, rationalism and enlightenment. He is brave, even relentless, in his attacks on subjectivism, mentalism, and spiritualism, as well as on positivism, mechanism, and dialectics. He believes in logic and clarity, in science and open-mindedness - not as the philosopher's equivalent to the poli tician's rhetoric of motherhood and apple pie, but as a matter of everyday practice, as qualities to cultivate daily in our pursuit of the life worth living. Bunge's philosophy often has the quality of Columbus's egg, and he is prone to come to swift and decisive conclusions on the basis of argu ments which seem to him valid; he will not be perturbed by the fact that most of the advanced thinkers in the field hold different views.

Inhalt
Some Remarks on Ontology.- A Kind of Collapse in a Simple Spacetime Model.- Poetic Imagination and Economy: Ernst Mach as Theorist of Science.- Some Thoughts on the Ideal of Exactness in Science and Philosophy.- On Hypotheses and Hypotheticism.- The Influence of Heraclitus on Modern Mathematics.- Free Intuitionistic Logic: A Formal Sketch.- Some Lessons in the Sun.- Interpretative Action Constructs.- Is Realistic History of Science Possible? A Hidden Inadequacy in the New History of Science.- Physics and the Doctrine of Reductionism.- Symbolism and Chance.- A Study in Protophysics.- Materialist Foundations of Critical Rationalism.- Analytic Philosophy as the Confrontation Between Wittgensteinians and Popper.- Distrust of Reason.- Teleology Redux.- Invariance and Covariance.- Molecular Phylogenetics: Biological Parsimony and Methodological Extravagance.- Letter to Mario: The Self and Its Mind.- The Young Hegel's Quest for a Philosophy of Science, or Pitting Kepler against Newton.- Three Kinds of Mathematical Fictionalism.- The Disastrous Effects of Experiment upon the Early Development of Thermodynamics.- Individualism and Concept Formation in the Social Sciences.- A New Theory of Intension.- The Place of Mario Bunge.- Concerning Mario Bunge.- I. Curriculum Vitae.- II. List of Publications of Mario Bunge.- III. Selected Reviews of Books by Mario Bunge.- Index of Names.