Gustavo Bueno
Gustavo Bueno Martínez 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.
Biography
Gustavo Bueno Martínez was born in Santo Domingo de la Calzada on 1 September 1924. He was the son of a Germanophile and the grandson of a Carlist. He began studies of philosophy at the University of Zaragoza, earning his licentiate degree from the University of Madrid. His PhD dissertation, under supervision from, was titled Fundamento formal y material de la moderna filosofía de la religión. From 1949 to 1960, he worked as a philosophy professor in the 'Lucía Medrano' female high school, located in Salamanca. Throughout the 1950s, he appears as provincial political commissar of the Movimiento. In 1954, he married noted SEU activist Carmen Sánchez Revilla. In 1960, he left for Oviedo, as he was appointed as a professor of Fundamentals of Philosophy and History of Philosophical Systems at the University of Oviedo. He died in, on 7 August 2016.Philosophical materialism
Philosophical materialism is a systematic doctrine about the structure of reality, characterized by its opposition to monistic 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".Spain and Empire
A main intellectual reference for 21st-century defendants of the legacy of the Spanish Habsburg Empire jointly with Elvira Roca Barea, he espoused the idea of the Asturian kingdom as an embryonic 'Spain' and as a case of Translatio imperii with respect to Rome, 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. 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.”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 since it would imply the extinction of the State, and with it the ratio imperii of any kind of plans and programs. This means that the Idea of Empire could never go beyond the particular circle of States and can never be extended to the totality of the Human Genus.”