Mario Bunge

Mario Bunge, who died in February 2020 at the age of 100, was both a physicist and a philosopher. He spent many decades in the Foundations and Philosophy of Science Unit at McGill University in Montreal. This article was excerpted by permission from “A Skeptic’s Beliefs and Disbeliefs,” the lead article of a special issue of New Ideas in Psychology devoted to “Mario Bunge on Nonscientific Psychology and Pseudoscience: A Debate” (vol. 9, no. 2, 1991). That journal’s editor at the time, Pierre Moessinger, wrote in a leadoff editorial, “Mario Bunge is one of the few great philosophers of science of our times. More precisely he is both a philosopher and a scientist. … What is so extraordinary about Bunge is the breadth of his intellectual interests and his ability to coordinate and synthesize problems.” Bunge’s paper was originally presented at a CSICOP conference on “Magical Thinking and Its Prevalence in the World Today” in Mexico City in 1989. Bunge was a longtime CSICOP/ CSI fellow and frequent contributor to Skeptical Inquirer.