This is a book about evolution from a post-Darwinian perspective. It recounts the core ideas of French philosopher Henri Bergson and his rediscovery and legacy in the poststructuralist critical philosophies of the 1960s, and explores the confluences of these ideas with those of complexity theory in environmental biology.

This is a book about evolution from a post-Darwinian perspective. It recounts the core ideas of French philosopher Henri Bergson and his rediscovery and legacy in the poststructuralist critical philosophies of the 1960s, and explores the confluences of these ideas with those of complexity theory in environmental biology.

Two streams run through the Western philosophical stream: one characterized by Being, beings, the unchanging, the static, and the unitary; and the other by Action, actions, the changing, the dynamic, and the diverse. The former might be represented by Parmenides, Plato, and much of what followed; the latter by Heraclitus, and by rather less of what followed. The book explores the "Action" stream as it wound its way through history, through Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Maurice Blondel, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, process philosophy and theology, Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John Boys Smith. The journey enables us to create the beginnings of an "actology": a way of seeing ourselves, the universe, and God in terms of actions in patterns rather than as beings that change. Such an actology offers a complete alternative narrative far more in tune with the diverse and rapidly changing world in which we live than the ontology that has shaped philosophy, theology, and much else for the past two thousand years.

Charles Frederick Frantz provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Debussy’s music through the lens of Bergson’s philosophical perspective of durée, revealing his "revolution" in musical time. In fin-de-siècle Paris, Debussy was revolutionizing musical time while Bergson was establishing a metaphysics that challenged the notion of measured or spatialized time. Bergson argued that real time or durée could be grasped only through intuition as opposed to analysis. Debussy eschewed analysis of music, declaring that separating it into parts was better left to engineers. Debussy’s music and Bergson’s durée were conceived and imagined in the environs of nature. The cycle of seasons, the gracefulness of a blooming flower, or a gentle breeze all suggest continuity, flow, and uninterrupted rhythm. The time of nature is the time of Debussy’s music and Bergson’s durée. Debussy’s use of open forms and Golden Sections create a time world of an expanded present, never ceasing. Bergson’s perception of real time is ever-changing, bringing the past into the present and open to unforeseen novelty. This book is intended primarily for scholars in the disciplines of musicology, music theory, and philosophy and can be used as a text for upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses in musicology or music theory.

This volume brings Bergson's key ideas from Matter and Memory into dialogue with contemporary themes on memory and time in science, across analytic and continental philosophy. Focusing specifically on the application of Bergson's ideas to cognitive science, the circuit between perception and memory receives full explication in 15 different essays. By re-reading Bergson through a cognitive lens, the essays provide a series of alternative analytic interpretations to the standard continental approach to Bergson's oeuvre, without fully discounting either approach. The relevance of philosophies of mind and memory sit alongside the role of a metaphysics of time in exploring connections to psychology, biology, and physics. This eclecticism includes an exciting focus on numerous topics that are not given sufficient attention in extant studies of Bergson, including the precise nature of his ideas on dualism, memory, and ecological theories of perception, especially in relation to his contemporaries. Led by leading Bergson scholars from France and Japan, this book maps the rich terrain of Bergson's contemporary relevance alongside the historical context of his ideas.

Over the past few decades, there has been a renewal of scholarly interest in the work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941). At once a commentary and a stark re-evaluation of Bergson’s philosophy, Updating Bergson: A Philosophy of the Enduring Present argues that time should be thought of as a hierarchy of simultaneous durations, the shifting reality of which can be revealed by the philosophical method of intuition. A duration is a perpetually dynamic flow situated in the now. Put simply, for Bergson, change is the substance of things. Nothing exists apart from alteration. Adam Lovasz analyzes Bergson’s philosophy of time, encompassing the three basic types of duration—material, organic, and subjective—and also touches on themes such as relativity, evolution, the problem of materialism and idealism, and the topic of free will. Lovasz connects key questions addressed by Bergson to contemporary scientific debates and paradigms. Shedding new light on the various aspects of Bergson's philosophy, this book is both a provocation and an invitation to think in terms of the enduring present, rather than committing ourselves to a dead past or an absent future.

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson became an international celebrity, profoundly influencing contemporary intellectual and artistic currents. While Bergsonism was fashionable, L. Susan Stebbing, Bertrand Russell, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap launched different critical attacks against some of Bergson’s views. This book examines this series of critical responses to Bergsonism early in the history of analytic philosophy. Analytic criticisms of Bergsonism were influenced by William James, who saw Bergson as an ‘anti-intellectualist’ ally of American Pragmatism, and Max Scheler, who saw him as a prophet of Lebensphilosophie. Some of the main analytic objections to Bergson are answered in the work of Karin Costelloe-Stephen. Analytic anti-Bergsonism accompanied the earlier refutations of idealism by Russell and Moore, and later influenced the Vienna Circle’s critique of metaphysics. It eventually contributed to the formation of the view that ‘analytic’ philosophy is divided from its ‘continental’ counterpart.