Repositions Bachelard as a critical and integral part of contemporary continental philosophy. Like Schelling before him and Deleuze and Guattari after him, Gaston Bachelard made major philosophical contributions to the advancement of science and the arts. In addition to being a mathematician and epistemologist whose influential work in the philosophy of science is still being absorbed, Bachelard was also one of the most innovative thinkers on poetic creativity and its ethical implications. His approaches to literature and the arts by way (...) of elemental reverie awakened long-buried modes of thinking that have inspired literary critics, depth psychologists, poets, and artists alike. Bachelard’s extraordinary body of work, unduly neglected by the English-language reception of continental philosophy in recent decades, exhibits a capacity to speak to the full complexity and wider reaches of human thinking. The essays in this volume analyze Bachelard as a phenomenological thinker and situate his thought within the Western tradition. Considering his work alongside that of Schelling, Husserl, Bergson, Buber, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Deleuze, and Nancy, this collection highlights some of Bachelard’s most provocative proposals on questions of ontology, hermeneutics, ethics, environmental politics, spirituality, and the possibilities they offer for productive transformations of self and world. (shrink)

Appearing in English for the first time, _Intuition of the Instant_—Bachelard’s first metaphysical meditation on time and its moral implications—was written in 1932 in the wake of Husserl’s lectures on streaming time-consciousness, Heidegger’s _Being and Time,_ and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of the élan vital. A culmination of Bachelard’s earlier studies in scientific epistemology, this work builds the epistemic framework that would lead theorists of all stripes to advance knowledge by breaking with accepted modes of thought. _Intuition of the Instant _sows (...) the seeds of Bachelard’s future poetics, most notably in the essay “Poetic Instant and Metaphysical Instant” —included in this volume, along with an excerpt from Jean Lescure’s lecture “Introduction to Bachelard’s Poetics”. Eileen Rizo-Patron’s translation offers a key to Bachelard’s subsequent works on science, time, and imagination, which remain epistemological touchstones. (shrink)