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Bergson Redux

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Bergson, Complexity and Creative Emergence

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Abstract

Why did Bergson, one of the most famous and highly regarded philosophers of the first decades of the 20th century1 — one of the ‘Select Forty’ of the Académie Française and a Nobel Laureate — so swiftly fall from sight, become, to all intents and purposes, a mere footnote and curiosity in histories of philosophy, by the 1980s? In 2000, when I first became interested in Bergson, little of his work was actually still in print in Britain. I was able to acquire, in a second-hand bookshop in Wells, Somerset, however, a 1944 US edition of Arthur Mitchell’s 1910 translation of Creative Evolution, with a Foreword written by Irwin Edman, as the very darkest days of the Second World War began to lift in December 1943, which gave a clue.

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Notes

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Kreps, D. (2015). Bergson Redux. In: Bergson, Complexity and Creative Emergence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137412201_3

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