This book brings together papers from a conference that took place in the city of L'Aquila, 4–6 April 2019, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the earthquake that struck on 6 April 2009. Philosophers and scientists from diverse fields of research debated the problem that, on 6 April 1922, divided Einstein and Bergson: the nature of time. For Einstein, scientific time is the only time that matters and the only time we can rely on. Bergson, however, believes that scientific time (...) is derived by abstraction, even in the sense of extraction, from a more fundamental time. The plurality of times envisaged by the theory of Relativity does not, for him, contradict the philosophical intuition of the existence of a single time. But how do things stand today? What can we say about the relationship between the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of time in the light of contemporary science? What do quantum mechanics, biology and neuroscience teach us about the nature of time? The essays collected here take up the question that pitted Einstein against Bergson, science against philosophy, in an attempt to reverse the outcome of their monologue in two voices, with a multilogue in several voices. (shrink)

The primary goal of this article is point out certain close parallels between some ideas of the radical feminist theorist Mary Daly and those of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. These similarities are particularly striking regarding distinctions made by both authors between two fundamentally contrasting types of cognitive faculty, of time and temporal experience, and of self and emotion. Daly departs from Bergson inasmuch as she employs these distinctions in her own way. She does not—like Bergson—employ them to depict the (...) result of a natural process of consciousness or life, and the dangers for human freedom and thought of not properly respecting these differences. Rather, she locates these differences within a more liberatory, ethical perspective to ground a sharp, inimical contrast between feminist creative movement on the one hand, and static, fixing, and “fixating” patriarchy, with its “technocratic” pretensions, on the other. My hope is that highlighting the similarities between Daly and Bergson will open new paths of appreciation and critique of Daly’s work. (shrink)

This chapter investigates the ontologies of fragments of photography from a number of different, but colliding, perspectives. Beginning with the Romantic fragments of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Lucretius’s atoms and the worms of Marx and Vonnegut. This seemingly random array of thoughts and thinkers concretises a multiplicity as a direct expression of the concepts put into play. With different ontological amalgams emerging from the range of multiples to hand, it becomes important to take account of not only of the complexity of (...) creativity at work, but also the apparently accidental events that are developed here. To investigate these concepts, this chapter turns to the philosophies of Simondon, Whitehead and Malabou. The impact of this upon photography generated at the confluence of human and nonhuman actors is examined in two areas. First, in the deliberate disruption of a phone camera app’s software, as shown in Bonamy Devas’s ‘Photo Tai Chi’ project. Second, in the unintended disruption of Jinkyun Ahn’s photos of his family, which were only partially recovered after being accidentally deleted. In concluding, this chapter seeks not to offer final, well-delineated, ontologically complete creations and to wonder in which ways can we ensure that any act of creation doesn’t completely exhaust its possibilities in its manifestation: this chapter included. (shrink)