[2] 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.

[2] In 1971, Buchler became Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he founded a graduate program in philosophical perspectives.

[5] Contrasted most clearly with pre-Socratic philosophers, Buchler believed there was no most simple, fundamental substance or element that comprised the universe.

In Toward a General Theory of Human Judgment, Buchler exchanges experience with a broader concept that he calls proception.

"[2] In his 2002 book Socrates Cafe, Christopher Phillips wrote that "Buchler's novel approach to metaphysics seems to herald what Lee Smolin calls 'the lightness of the new search for knowledge'.