Browse — tag · bergson
Tag: bergson
Pages tagged with bergson.
23 pages
-
Cinematographic Mechanism of Thought
Bergson's name (Chapter IV of Creative Evolution) for the structural way the human intellect falsifies movement and becoming: it extracts immobile snapshots ("views," vues) from the moving real and then recomposes movement by running the s…
-
Creative Evolution
Author(s): Henri Bergson · Year: 1907 (trans. Donald A. Landes, Routledge 2023) · Type: book
-
Creative Evolution (true vs. false evolutionism)
Beyond the title of Bergson's book and the doctrine of the élan vital, "creative evolution" names a method and a thesis about reality: that evolution is a genuine creation of the unforeseeable, and that grasping it requires pursuing the th…
-
Depth of Time (Temporal Depth)
The temporal counterpart of spatial depth: the felt thickness of time as inherent to a perspective, not a distance representable "in profile." Décarie-Daigneault 2024 develops the structural parallel with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of s…
-
Does the retrograde movement of the true solve or deepen historical relativism?
It does both — and this is its point, not its failure. Merleau-Ponty's radicalization of Bergson's phrase is not a theorem that dissolves the relativism problem but a reframing that denies the problem's usual formulation. The standard rela…
-
Durée (Duration)
Bergson's name for real, lived time: qualitative, continuous, indivisible, irreversible, and creative of the genuinely unforeseeable — "the continuous progression of the past, gnawing into the future and swelling up as it advances" (EC 7).…
-
Generative Passivity
The ontological origin of sense in nonsense — not mere inertness or absence of activity, but a "generative temporal openness" that precedes and grounds all constituting activity. Generative passivity names the emergence of activity from no…
-
In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1970 (English combined edition; Part 1 original 1953, Part 2 original 1968) Type: Book (combined volume: inaugural lecture + course summaries)
-
Intellect, Instinct, Intuition
In Creative Evolution Bergson treats intellect, instinct, and intuition not as three rungs of one ladder but as divergent directions of a single consciousness, differing in kind not in degree — "the major error, the one that has been passe…
-
Leonard Lawlor
American philosopher and translator; Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University (since 2008; formerly Faudree-Hardin University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, where he served from 1990–2008).…
-
Melting Time (temps fondant)
David Morris's name (drawn from a Merleau-Ponty unpublished working note) for the indeterminate, invisible, undifferentiated change prior to time-orders that, through its own dynamics, generates visible, determinate time-forms. Morris's ti…
-
Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1956–60)
Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty Compiler/editor (French): Dominique Séglard Translator: Robert Vallier Original French: La Nature: Notes, cours du Collège de France (Éditions du Seuil, 1995) English edition: Northwestern University Press, 20…
-
Nothingness as a Pseudo-Idea (Bergson)
Bergson's sustained critique of the negative (Creative Evolution Chapters III–IV): the ideas of absolute Nothingness, of disorder, and of the unrealized possible are pseudo-ideas — they appear to have content but, examined, "destroy themse…
-
Philosophy-Screens: From Cinema to the Digital Revolution
<!-- NAMING NOTE (CR-037, 2026-05-24): This source page is named carbone-2019-philosophy-screens.md (English-translation year), but its extraction note is .extraction-carbone-2016-philosophy-screens.md (French-original year). The mismatch…
-
Retrograde Movement of the True
Merleau-Ponty's term (borrowed from Bergson and radicalized) for the structure in which a new truth, once established, appears retrospectively to have been already present before its discovery — though it was not. "There is truly a retrogr…
-
Shadow Philosophy
The hermeneutic and critical method by which a thinker is read through the unthought philosophy within his thought — not the explicit doctrine the thinker states, but the other philosophy implied by his statements that he himself did not t…
-
The Anonymous Temporality of Animal Life: Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze on the Passive Syntheses of the Organic
Author(s): Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault Year: 2025 Type: paper (journal article, Continental Philosophy Review 58:445–467)
-
The Birth of Sense: Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy
Author(s): Don Beith Year: 2018 Type: book (Ohio University Press, Series in Continental Thought No. 52)
-
The Crooked Finger of Chauvet-Pont d'Arc: Retrieving the Depth of Time Through a Transtemporal Account of Parietal Art
Author(s): Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault Year: 2024 Type: paper (journal article, Chiasmi International vol. 26, pp. 263–282)
-
The Ideal Genesis of Matter (détente / inversion)
The metaphysical core of Creative Evolution Chapter III: Bergson's account of how intellectuality and materiality are engendered together from a higher "Consciousness in general," such that matter is the inversion-by-interruption of spirit…
-
Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question
Author: Leonard Lawlor (University of Memphis, Department of Philosophy) · Year: 2003 · Type: book (collected essays, revised; Indiana University Press, Studies in Continental Thought series)
-
Wild Structure and Melting Time: On Quantum Mechanics and Matter as Change in Merleau-Ponty's Temporal Ontology
Author: David Morris (Concordia University) Year: 2024 Type: paper (journal article) Journal: Chiasmi International 26 (2024), pp. 157-173. DOI: 10.5840/chiasmi20242616
-
Élan vital
Bergson's name (introduced in Creative Evolution, 1907) for the original impetus of life: a single creative current that "passes from one generation of germs to the next," dividing itself among the divergent lines of evolution "without the…