Key Writings

Description

The twentieth century - with its unprecedented advances in technology and scientific understanding - saw the birth of a distinctively new and 'modern' age. Henri Bergson stood as one of the most important philosophical voices of that tumultuous time. An intellectual celebrity in his own life time, his work was widely discussed by such thinkers as William James, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, as well as having a profound influence on modernist writers such as Wallace Stevens, Willa Cather and Wyndham Lewis and later thinkers, most notably Gilles Deleuze. Key Writings brings together Bergson's most essential writings in a single volume, including crucial passages from such major work as Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution, Mind-Energy, The Creative Mind, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion and Laughter. The book also includes Bergson's correspondences with William James and a chronology of his life and work.

Keith Ansell Pearson holds a Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. John O Maoilearca is Professor of Film and Television Studies at Kingston University, UK. He is the author of Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh UP, 1999), Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (Continuum, 2006) and Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was one of the most important philosophical figures of the earlier twentieth-century, a cult figure in his day and a profound influence on such thinkers and writers as William James, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.

"Henri Bergson: Key Writings will change the way we will think about Twentieth Century philosophy. It includes selections from all of Bergson's important published texts and English translations of other never before translated texts. Ansell-Pearson and Mullarkey have done a great job; their Preface to the volume is one of the best introductions to (and expansions of) Bergson's philosophy available in any language."--Leonard Lawlor, University of Memphis