Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition

✍ Scribed by Keith Ansell-Pearson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 209
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

A thought-provoking contribution to the renaissance of interest in Bergson, this study brings him to a new generation of readers. Ansell-Pearson contends that there is a Bergsonian revolution, an upheaval in philosophy comparable in significance to those that we are more familiar with, from Kant to Nietzsche and Heidegger, that make up our intellectual modernity.
The focus of the text is on Bergson’s conception of philosophy as the discipline that seeks to ‘think beyond the human condition’. Not that we are caught up in an existential predicament when the appeal is made to think beyond the human condition; rather that restricting philosophy to the human condition fails to appreciate the extent to which we are not simply creatures of habit and automatism, but also organisms involved in a creative evolution of becoming.

✦ Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations and Editions Used
Introduction: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition
Chapter 1 An Introduction to Bergson
Bergson’s Reception of Kant
Thinking Beyond the Human Condition
Duration
Intuition
Bergson’s Critique of Ethical Rationalism
Chapter 2 A Melancholy Science: Bergson on Lucretius
I
II
Concluding Thoughts
Chapter 3 Bergson on Time, Freedom, and the Self
Bergson’s Challenge to Common Sense and Science
The Two Multiplicities
Is Time Space?
The Errors of the Associationist Model of the Mind
The Force of Time
Bergson on the Self
Conclusion
Chapter 4 Bergson on Memory
Matter and Memory
The Types of Memory
Perception and Memory
Reception and Influence
Chapter 5 On Bergson’s Reformation of Philosophy in Creative Evolution
On the Ambition of Creative Evolution
The Challenge of the New Biology
Bergson on Philosophy and the Study of Evolution
Life
Bergson and the Hard Problem of Science: What is Life?
Conclusion
Chapter 6 Bergson and Ethics
Bergson and Morality
Bergson on the Origins of Morality and the Character of Obligation
The Open Soul and Creative Emotion
Bergson between Biology and Phenomenology
Obstacles to Humanity’s Moral Progress
Conclusion
Chapter 7 Bergson and Nietzsche on Religion: Critique, Immanence, and Affirmation
Bergson on Static Religion
Bergson on Dynamic Religion
Nietzsche on Religion
Natural Religion: Immanence and Affirmation
Chapter 8 Bergson on Education and the Art of Life
Philosophy
Towards Intuition
Intuition and Sympathy
Education Beyond Intelligence
Conclusion
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Index