Gustavo Bueno

Gustavo Bueno Martínez (1 September 1924 – 7 August 2016) was a Spanish philosopher, founder of a philosophical doctrine dubbed by himself as "philosophical materialism".

Pupil of the national-syndicalist Santiago Montero Díaz, Bueno's philosophical path reached a blend of Aristotelico-Thomist scholasticism influenced by the Catholic School of Salamanca and Marxism–Leninism during the years of the late Francoism.^[2]

Gustavo Bueno Martínez was born in Santo Domingo de la Calzada on 1 September 1924.^[3][4] He was the son of a Germanophile and the grandson of a Carlist.^[5] He began studies of philosophy at the University of Zaragoza, earning his licentiate degree (as well as his PhD degree) from the University of Madrid.^[6] His PhD dissertation, under supervision from Santiago Montero Díaz, was titled Fundamento formal y material de la moderna filosofía de la religión ('Formal and material foundation of the modern philosophy of religion').^[7] From 1949 to 1960, he worked as a philosophy professor (and from 1951 on also as a principal) in the 'Lucía Medrano' female high school, located in Salamanca.^[8] Throughout the 1950s, he appears as provincial political commissar of the Movimiento.^[5] In 1954, he married noted SEU activist Carmen Sánchez Revilla.^[5] In 1960, he left for Oviedo,^[9] as he was appointed as a professor of Fundamentals of Philosophy and History of Philosophical Systems at the University of Oviedo.^[10] He died in Niembro (Llanes, Asturias), on 7 August 2016.^[11]

Philosophical materialism is a systematic doctrine about the structure of reality, characterized by its opposition to monistic materialism (typical of dialectical materialism) and to monistic idealism or spiritualism of theology. However philosophical materialism is a pluralism of rationalism, that postulates the uniqueness of the world as a development of a general ontological matter that does not reduce to the empirical world. Philosophical materialism denies, against monistic continuity, and in agreement with the principle of the symploké that, "everything has an influence in everything" and denies, against pluralistic atomism that, "nothing has an influence in anything".^[12][13]

A main intellectual reference for 21st-century defendants of the legacy of the Spanish Habsburg Empire (as opposed to the Bourbon) jointly with Elvira Roca Barea,^[14] he espoused the idea of the Asturian kingdom as an embryonic 'Spain' and as a case of Translatio imperii with respect to Rome (bypassing the Visigoths, as they occupied the Iberian Peninsula, but they would have done it so "with the will to remain in seclusion in it"), pursuing the "imperial city" category for Oviedo, underpinning his main thesis of that of the "consubstantiality" of the process of the constitution of 'Spain' as a characteristic entity of Universal History and the process of its conformation as a Universal Empire.^[15] He supported the political reunification of Hispanic states in the form of a confederation: “The constitution of a Hispanic or Ibero-American Confederation, with a Common Market of around 500 million inhabitants, is, for Professor Bueno, the only alternative that the American peoples, as well as Spain and Portugal, have open to free themselves from the Anglo-American Empire.”^[16]

Bueno’s philosophical analysis of the idea of empire can be summarized with the following quote: “Universal history is supposed to be the history of the human genus. According to, say, Hegel and St. Augustine. But this must be subjected to criticism. Universal history is not made by the totality of the human genus but rather by a part of it. Empires are the part that is mentioned before.” From there he concludes that “the Idea of a Universal Empire, endowed with uniqueness, is impossible (not that it is improbable) since it would imply the extinction of the State (the State always presupposes the plurality of States separated by their “cortical layers”), and with it the ratio imperii of any kind of plans and programs. This means that the Idea of Empire (this is its dialectical contradiction) could never go beyond the particular circle of States and can never be extended to the totality of the Human Genus.”^[17]

• Sciences as Categorical Closures, 2013
• El papel de la Filosofía en el conjunto del saber (1971)
• Ensayos materialistas (1972)
• Ensayo sobre las Categorías de la Economía Política, (1973)
• La Metafísica Presocrática, (1975)
• La Idea de Ciencia desde la Teoría del Cierre Categorial, 1977
• Etnología y utopía, 1982
• Nosotros y ellos, 1983
• El animal divino, 1985
• Cuestiones cuodlibetales sobre Dios y la Religión, (1989)
• Materia, (1990)]
• Primer ensayo sobre las categorías de las Ciencias Políticas, (1991)
• Teoría del Cierre Categorial (5 vols.), 1993
• ¿Qué es la filosofía? (1995)
• ¿Qué es la ciencia? (1995)
• El Mito de la Cultura: ensayo de una teoría materialista de la cultura, 1997
• España frente a Europa, 2000
• Telebasura y democracia, 2002
• El mito de la izquierda: las izquierdas y la derecha, 2003
• La vuelta a la caverna: terrorismo, guerra y globalización, 2004
• España no es un mito: claves para una defensa razonada, 2005
• Zapatero y el pensamiento Alicia: un presidente en el país de las maravillas, 2006
• La fe del ateo, 2007
• El Mito de la derecha, 2008
• Ensayo de una definición filosófica de la Idea de Deporte, 2014
• El Ego trascendental, 2016

• 2015 – Gustavo Bueno. La vuelta a la caverna (dir. Héctor Muniente) – documentary

• Fundación Gustavo Bueno official web page