Bergson(-ism) Remembered: A Roundtable

The Socratic Bergson

Margaret Fountaine: a Lepidopterist Remembered.

Margaret Fountaine (1862-1940) was a lepidopterist during a period of transition and professionalization in natural history. Over her lifespan she collected more than 22000 butterflies, published extensively and wrote a diary of more than a million words. Wealthy and independent, Fountaine toured Europe in her early twenties and then, over the next 50 years, travelled the globe collecting butte...

A Roundtable Discussion 3

Vernon Remembered

Editor's Note: The world of neuroscience lost one of its pioneers when Vernon B. Mountcastle, M.D., died January 11 in Baltimore at age 96. Often referred to as " the father of neuroscience, " Mountcastle defied early skeptics by showing how cylinders of neurons, dedicated to specific tasks, work together. This month's Cerebrum features remembrances from two colleagues influenced by Mountcastle...

Chronic Conditions: Beckett, Bergson and Samuel Johnson

This article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the eighteenth-century neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). What unites these three very different thinkers is a concern over habitual, automatic and involuntary behavior, which in all three cases has a distinctly neurolog...