Henri Bergson

For 15 years, Henri Bergson, the most important French philosopher of the early 20th century, taught at the Collège de France. Speaking without notes, most of his classes are now lost to history, but records of a handful of courses fortuitously survived thanks to stenographic transcripts. Conveying Bergson’s very voice, these extraordinary documents are finally presented here in English. The...

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 lifetime, his work was widely discussed by such thinkers as William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand...

First published in French in 1907, Henri Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice is a scintillating and radical work by one of the great French philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This outstanding new translation, the first for over a hundred years, brings one of Bergson’s most important and ambitious works to a new generation of readers. A sympathetic though critical reader...

"Since the end of the last century," Walter Benjamin wrote, "philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the 'true' experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilised masses. It is customary to classify these efforts under the heading of a philosophy of life. Towering above this literature...

First published in French in 1907, Henri Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice is a scintillating and radical work by one of the great French philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This outstanding new translation, the first for over a hundred years, brings one of Bergson’s most important and ambitious works to a new generation of readers. A sympathetic though critical reader...

Dreams can be fun and adventurous, but also frightening and distorted, and still again, they can be an endless combination of both. From spitting teeth out (a sign of ageing), to creepy, crawly spiders (a sign that one feels like an outsider), dreams can mean much more to us once we learn how to decipher their hidden meanings. Whether positive...