It is precision, M. Bergson suggests in his last book, 1 that has most been lacking in philosophy. Imprecision declares itself in two respects: philosophical systems of the past apply indifferently to many imaginary worlds, and so allows this actual world to slip through their meshes; and they ignore the sense or direction evinced in the order and process of this actual world. Such systems “do not fit the reality in which we live, but are too large for it. (...) Any of them would apply equally well to a world in which plants, animals, and men did not exist, or one in which men went without food and drink and did not sleep or dream or rave, to a world in which men were born decrepit and suckled in old age … Such systems of conceptions are so abstract, consequently so vast, that they can be made to hold everything possible alongside the real”. That we should interpret them always with an eye on this actual world and so regard them as being literal transcriptions of the actual is a witness to the practical bias of our thinking and a quite arbitrary reading of them. Contrasted with these highly abstract systems, M. Bergson claims that his own explanation “adheres to its object” and leaves no gap in which an alternative one could find foothold. (shrink)

Je me proposai, pour ma thèse de doctorat, Bergson d'étudier les concepts fondamentaux de la mécanique. C'est ainsi que je fus conduit à m'occuper de l'idée de temps. Je m'aperçus, non sans surprise, qu'il n'est jamais question de durée proprement dite en mécanique, ni même en physique, et que le "temps" dont on y parle est tout autre chose. Je me demandai alors où est la durée réelle, et ce qu'elle pouvait bien être, et pourquoi notre mathématique n'a pas (...) de prise sur elle. De ces réflexions est sorti l'Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience où j'essaie de pratiquer une introspection absolument directe et de saisir la durée pure. (Bergson, lettre à G. Papini, 21 octobre 1903). A la croisée de la psychologie et de la métaphysique, le premier ouvrage de Bergson, paru en 1889, contient en germe l'ensemble de sa philosophie. En nous invitant à nous déprendre de nos cadres de pensée figés, il y montre que le temps n'est pas une réalité physique, mais une dimension de la conscience vivante, et, tissant un lien entre philosophie de la conscience et théorie de l'action, il aborde à nouveaux frais la question de la liberté. (shrink)

At last his students and colleagues, his friends and his friendly critics, his fellow-scientist and fellow-philosophers, have the works of Milic Capek before them in one volume, aside from his books of course. Now the development of his interests and his thoughts, always led centrally by his concern to understand 'the philosophical impact of contemporary physics', becomes clear. In the nearly 90 essays and papers, and in his book on the philosophical impact as well as his classical restatement of process (...) philosophy in his Bergson and Modern Physics, Professor Capek establishes one of the fundamental alternatives to the comprehension of human experience, and thereby of the world. Capek is certainly to be seen with respect and admiration, for he has dealt with the deepest and toughest of scientific as well as metaphysical problems: his major efforts in the philosophy of mind focussed upon the time of experience, and in the philosophy of physics focussed upon continuity, causality and again the temporal, now in the world-picture. (shrink)

This article highlights the mathematical structure of Henri Bergson’s method. While Bergson has been historically interpreted as an anti-scientific and irrationalist philosopher, he modeled his philosophical methodology on the infinitesimal calculus developed by Leibniz and Newton in the seventeenth century. His philosophy, then, rests on the science of number, at least from a methodological standpoint. By looking at how he conscripted key mathematical concepts into his philosophy, this article invites us to re-imagine Bergson’s place in the history (...) of Western philosophy. (shrink)

Louis Cazamian develops Henri Bergson’s concise remarks, which show humour as a special sort of comical transposition of language. Cazamian stresses that humour is based on transposition, which is inevitably conscious, and he is concerned with the division of humour into four different species according to the modes of transposition. Cazamian focuses especially on the complexity of humour and its impact. Even if a certain view of the world and life, that is, a kind of “matter” of humour, is (...) obviously suggested by the mechanism of transposition, that is, by the “form” of humour, it is impossible to determine any universal rule describing the relationship between matter and form. In that sense Cazamian emphasizes the indefinability of humour, and points to the indeterminability of the humorous effect. These arguments demonstrate the essential influence that many important themes of Bergson’s aesthetics and philosophy have had on Cazamian’s conception of humour, a conception that proves to be integrally Bergsonian. (shrink)

This article examines the mutual influence between Ernst Cassirer and his cousin, the neurologist Kurt Goldstein. For both Cassirer and Goldstein, views on the nature of human cognition were fundamental to their understanding of scientific knowledge, and these were informed by both philosophical theorizing and empirical research on pathologies of the nervous system. Following Cassirer, and in agreement with the physicalism of the Vienna Circle, Goldstein held that the physical sciences had progressed by arriving at abstract, mathematical representations to take (...) the place of qualitative characterizations of observable reality. In tension with physicalism, Goldstein was not sanguine about the fruitfulness of the abstractive approach in biology. He proposed that biology must adhere to its own sui generis methods of observation and experimentation in order to obtain knowledge of the “natures” of living organisms. I argue that there is a parallel with Cassirer’s assertion of the differences between physical and cultural sciences, underwritten by the deployment of varying symbolic functions. I also propose that the neurological writings of Goldstein are an important backdrop to Cassirer’s positive evaluation of abstract thought, in contrast to the pessimism regarding a worldview dominated by scientific abstractions expressed by philosophers such as Bergson, Whitehead, and Husserl. (shrink)

This paper argues that 'duality' accounts of time, as exemplified by Henri Bergson's, Edmund Husserl's, and John McTaggart's ideas, parallel the decomposition of temporal experience in depressive psychosis into objective and subjective dimensions of time. The paper also proposes to comprehend the full-fledged depressive temporal delusion, in which the subjective flow of time comes to a standstill, via the idea of a double orientation to reality characteristic of schizophrenic delusions. In the depressive temporal delusion a person claims that time (...) is not moving while simultaneously her cognitive orientation in temporal surroundings remains largely unaffected, hence the double orientation. The juxtaposition of temporal experience in depression with the temporal disorientation in dementia enables us to situate the depressive delusion regarding the flow of time in the middle of a proposed scale of the disintegration of normal temporal experience. (shrink)

This article seeks to explain how Bergson's philosophy was translated into a genuine political position in the Ottoman-Turkish context. I first overview the impact of Bergson's philosophy on continental politics at the beginning of the twentieth century; I then try to explain how Bergson's philosophical claims acquired definite political connotations; and lastly, I aim to display how political Bergsonism became a border language between republican radicals and conservatives in Turkey in the 1920s. I argue that, at the (...) crossroads of all currents of European modernity, political Bergsonism heralded the birth of a new vision of conservative modernity that molded the underlying values and principles of the transformation of Turkey into a modern society. (shrink)

Este artículo estudia la razón de Zambrano desde sus albores como razón mediadora. Su rechazo del sistema va unido a su comienzo en la intuición y a su decurso temporal, que analizamos en relación con Bergson y Husserl. La razón poética va más allá de ese núcleo intuitivo para revelar re-flexivamente incluso lo invisible. Su inmersión en las profundidades, en la pasividad actuante, en las entrañas, en la multiplicidad de los tiempos es paralela a la fenomenología de la génesis (...) merleau-pontiana, a su poiesis carnal e incluso al telos de una razón ampliada al sentir. Ambos filósofos ejercitan su nueva concepción de la filosofía en la existencia. (shrink)

Philosophy of technology is gaining recognition as an important field of philosophical scrutiny. This essay addresses the import of philosophy of technology in two ways. First, it seeks elucidate the place of technology within ontology, epistemology, and social/political philosophy. I argue technology inhabits an essential place in these fields. The philosophy of Henri Bergson plays a central role in this section. Second, I discuss how modern technology, its further development, and its inter-cultural transfer constitute a drive toward a global (...) “hegemony of technology”. The crux of the argument is that the technological impulse within humanity insinuates itself into nearly every aspect of human existence. The structures of the state, the economy, and culture, are each framed by this impulse. In the final analysis, it is argued that only a thorough examination of the intimate connection between humanity and technology can lay the foundation for a comprehensive philosophy of human existence. (shrink)

Yet another medical ethics book has been published, but the difference this time is that I actually like it Sokol and Bergson’s handbook Medical ethics and law—surviving on the wards and passing exams is for medical students and junior doctors preparing for life in medicine and for the inevitable exams. The format of the book closely follows that of the core curriculum for medical ethics and law set out by the BMA in 2004 in Medical ethics today. The book (...) …. (shrink)

What is the relation of an earlier being to a later such that given the earlier there is or will be a later? I call this the question of material continuation. To answer, I offer a review of several philosophers’ thoughts, including those of Zeno, Aristotle, Descartes, Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead. While there is considerable variety among the ontological views of these philosophers, and indeed some direct opposition of both method and assertion, my review suggests (...) that material continuation may be explained by reference to a principle of continual creation. This principle is reflected in Aristotle's unmoved mover, in Descartes's account of God's activity in persistence, in Bergson's concept of la durée, and in Whitehead's principle of creativity. It disappears from view in objective methodologies first emerging in pre-Socratic thought, made rigorous by the development of science by the modern philosophers such as Descartes, and realized in the scientist philosophy of Russell. I include some consideration of whether the creative principle might be ideal or divine. (shrink)

Gonseth's primary concern in this volume, as in his earlier study of space, is the methodology of philosophical investigation. How does the philosopher achieve thoroughness without introducing arbitrariness? His method of dialectical synthesis is aptly illustrated by focusing on a privileged example, the problem of time. Common language analysis of "time" words, his initial concern, gives a preliminary sketch of a solution by making explicit the intuitive view of time implicit in language. Language, however, is unintelligible apart from experience, while (...) experience, in turn, entails an openness to the deeper understanding made possible through mathematics and physics. Yet neither of these is self-sufficient. A time order can be axiomatized, but the interpretation of this axiomatic system involves the intersection of a theoretical horizon and a phenomenal horizon. Similarly, the more precisely the physicist attempts to measure coincidences and durations the more dependent he becomes on theoretical knowledge and on a personal evaluation of the total situation. Neither Bergson's stress on subjective time nor the positivists' objectification of time can properly interrelate intuitive, mathematical, and physical time. A dialectical synthesis clarifies and integrates the subjective and objective aspects of time. This challenging book invites philosophers of all persuasions to re-examine their own implicit assumptions on the nature and method of philosophy.—E. M. M. (shrink)

The book of Bergson underlying the present study appeared in 1896. It is entitled “Matter and Memory” and is a philosophical disquisition into the relation and mutual limitations of organic life and inert matter. Bergson proposes to deal with this very general problem under the special aspect of a theory of the functioning of the human brain and the mechanism of ordinary memory. Such use of the inductive method, which starts from a special problem in order to arrive (...) at results that might be generalized later, might endear him to the exact scientist who has a healthy skepticism toward pure generalities. But let us for a moment remain in the realm of generalities in order to better circumscribe the subject: Few people would agree to an entirely mechanistic interpretation of organic life; hence there should be some point in biology at which the deviations from pure mechanism appear explicitly and in their fulness. For the present we shall adopt an intentionally oversimplified mode of expression. Let us say that mechanistic description is causal and that as our analysis progresses we must eventually arrive at a point where we can no longer trace the causal chains in their entirety. At that point we must replace causal “classical” physics by quantum mechanics and form our pictures of microscopic realities of organic matter in terms of the latter. Some of the pertinent problems have been pointed out by the present writer among others, following earlier suggestions by Niels Bohr. Suffice it here to say that certain processes of the atomic scale going on in a complex system such as the organic tissue essentially escape detailed observation that would allow us to determine the continuity of an entirely causal nexus. It is possible to make such observations, but they result in physical destruction of the very coherence of the organic tissue upon which the biological functioning depends. Bohr describes this condition by the term “generalized complementarity.” We cannot enter into a discussion of these problems here; let us adopt deliberately the oversimplified and somewhat vague expression that at some point indeterminacies become significant in the microscopic processes that take place in the organic body. We shall try to limit ourselves in this paper to the simplistic notion of a multiplicity of indeterminate events inserted into the play of molecular reactions that constitute the functioning of the organism from the viewpoint of the physicist and chemist. (shrink)

Bergson never dared to entitle his own work in such a fashion. However, his philosophical contribution on the workings of intelligence deserves such a high title. This article seeks to elucidate Bergson's contribution to philosophy in terms of his anticipation of several developments in human understanding. The work begins by investigating the relation between thought and the world (reality) by reviewing a series of constructivist concepts. In many ways, constructivism is related to both structuralism and post-structuralism, however this (...) work does not seek to detail these interrelations in any overt way. Instead, these concepts lay the groundwork for a review of Bergson's discussion of intellect in relation to life, psyche, and modern physics. Central concepts include limitation, circularity, and complementarity. Ultimately, the article seeks to display how Bergson's work is not only a precursor to constructivism but lays the foundation for a modified constructivism that can achieve a rigorous philosophical level. The proposed ground for the intellect is in the organic. Such an epistemological foundationalism would ultimately justify an evolutionary epistemology, in that, the structuring of the organic is evolving and thus the structuring of intellect would likewise evolve. Clarifying such an epistemology may aid in developing Delueze's an-organic bergsonism. (shrink)