In 1961, he responded to a paper offering a resolution of the so-called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox, which appeared to show that the description of reality offered by quantum mechanics could not be complete. A crucial element in the formalism of quantum mechanics is a mathematical device known as the ‘wave function’. (It is this argument that is the source of much of the so-called New Age commentary on quantum mechanics about how reality must somehow be observer-dependent, and so on.) Bauer was an excellent teacher and the first in France to teach the new quantum theory. This is not to say that other writers in the phenomenological tradition failed to bring quantum mechanics within their philosophical purview.