IV.—JAMES, BERGSON, AND TRADITIONAL METAPHYSICS

Psychology and Metaphysics from Maine De Biran to Bergson

Introduction What can psychology, understood as a study of the nature of mental phenomena, tell us about metaphysics, understood as an account of the nature of being and of the most general properties of the world? At a certain degree of generality this question is itself a metaphysical one: how can what we know about our own minds tell us something about the world? But the meaning of the quest...

The Socratic Bergson

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...

Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming

Deleuze understood Bergson as perhaps the greatest theorist of difference, the theorist whose insistence brought difference into philosophy and showed that philosophy was irresistibly drawn, insofar as it is directed by real questions and problems, those that impinge on us without relief, to that which differs from itself, to that which exists only as becoming. For Bergson, philosophy brings to...

Bergson and the Holographic Theory of Mind

Bergson’s model of time (1889) is perhaps the proto-phenomenological theory. It is part of a larger model of mind (1896) which can be seen in modern light as describing the brain as supporting a modulated wave within a holographic field, wherein subject and object are differentiated not in terms of space, but of time. Bergson’s very concrete model is developed and deepened with Gibson’s ecologi...