Justus Buchler

Justus Buchler (; March 27, 1914 – March 19, 1991) was an American philosopher, author and professor. He made contributions to the subjects of naturalism and metaphysics, introducing the concept of the natural complex.

Biography

Buchler was born in New York City, the eldest of three children of rabbi Samuel Buchler and Ida Frost Buchler. Buchler's sister, Beatrice Buchler Gotthold, was the founding editor of Working Woman magazine, and the first female vice president of the New York Times Company.

Buchler earned his Ph.D. in 1938 from Columbia University; his dissertation was published in 1939 as Charles Peirce's Empiricism. In 1942, Buchler became a full-time instructor at Columbia, where he and mentor John Herman Randall Jr. co-authored the textbook Philosophy: An Introduction. In 1950, Buchler became an associate professor at Columbia; in 1956 he was promoted to full professor. which asserts the equal reality of whatever is, and ordinal metaphysics, which asserts the indefinite complexity of whatever is.

Political activism

Buchler was an active opponent of McCarthyism, co−authoring the paper "Academic Due Process: A Statement of Desirable Procedures Applicable within Educational Institutions in Cases Involving Academic Freedom" in 1954. In 1961, he co−authored Academic Freedom and Civil Liberties of Students in Colleges and Universities and Teacher Disclosure of Information about Students to Prospective Employers; the latter was adopted as a policy statement of the ACLU.

Works

Primary books Charles Peirce's Empiricism (1939) Toward a General Theory of Human Judgment (1951) Nature and Judgment (1955) The Concept of Method (1961) Metaphysics of Natural Complexes (1966) The Main of Light: On the Concept of Poetry (1974)

Other books Obiter scripta : lectures, essays and reviews / by George Santayana, edited by Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz (1936) Editor: The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings (1940) With John H. Randall Jr.: Philosophy: An Introduction (1942)

Selected articles "Russell and the Principle of Ethics", in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (1944) "The Liberal Arts and General Education" (1952) "What Is the Pragmaticist Theory of Meaning?", in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, pp. 21−32 (1952) "On the Problem of Liberal Education" (1954) "What Is a Discussion?" (1954) "Reconstruction in the Liberal Arts" (1954) "Ontological Parity", in Naturalism and Historical Understanding: Essays on the Philosophy of John Herman Randall, Jr. (1967) "On the Concept of 'The World"', Review of Metaphysics 31, pp. 555–79 (1978) "Probing the Idea of Nature", Process Studies 8, pp. 157–68 (1979)