Many of his contemporaries considered Justus Buchler the most distinguished living systematic philosopher in the United States. His ideas are elaborated in five books and several articles written over a span of thirty years. In regard to his themes Buchler was influenced by the classical American philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and John Dewey; in regard to philosophical method he drew his inspiration chiefly from Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. As a result, his work, while widely respected, falls outside the mainstream of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. His writings, especially Metaphysics of Natural Complexes (1966; enlarged, 1990), are notable for their elegantly spare style.

Buchler was born in New York City on 27 March 1914, the first of three children of Samuel and Ida Frost Buchler. Samuel Buchler had been born in Hungary, where he earned a Ph.D. in history and was ordained a...