Interview with Mario Bunge 5

This is the fifth in a series of videos based on interviews with Professor Mario Bunge that took place in Montreal in early February 2011. Each clip covers a set of general themes from his vast oeuvre in the philosophy of science. Bunge's achievement is unique: he provides a systematic and comprehensive philosophy that is conversant with all the contemporary sciences from physics to the social sciences and deals with the entire range of fundamental problems in ontology, epistemology, semantics, ethics, and logic. Those who have studied some of his work either consider him an intellectual terrorist to be feared or a philosophical freedom fighter who sheds bright light on the fundamental questions of scientific knowledge. He takes no prisoners. He exposes obscurantists, names charlatans, and levels scathing criticisms at the scholasticism of academics content to study each other's works rather than engage with reality. There is no one who comes even close to matching what Bunge has managed to do in a long life of scholarship. Perhaps this is why his work is not much more widely celebrated. Maybe the fact that he has neither a British nor American accent or habitus plays a role - even a French or German accent might have helped in the shallow real world of twentieth and twenty-first century philosophers. Lest this conjures up an image of a virtual unknown: Bunge ranks 112th in the new Science Hall of Fame, which measures the frequency with which the full names of scientists appear in books published between 1800 and 2000.

In this part of the interview, Professor Bunge provides some additional examples of examples of eminent scientists who believed all kinds of nonsense from parapsychology to psychoanalysis. The examples include Prosper-René Blondlot, J.B.S. Haldane, and Luc Montagnier. Bunge also considers the working of the so-called Placebo effect - which he believes exists but is usually not properly explained.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Mario Bunge
• philosophy of science
• science and philosophy
• Prosper-René Blondlot
• J.B.S. Haldane
• Luc Montagnier
• parapsychology
• homeopathy
• psychoanalysis
• Placebo effect
• John Archibald Wheeler