Bergson, Politics and Religion

by Lefebvre, Alexandre

• ISBN13: 9780826422347
• ISBN10: 0826422349
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-08-30
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Academic

Summary

Bergson, Politics and Religion presents the first comprehensive study of Henri Bergson's political, religious and social thought. Bergson's reputation as the pre-eminent French philosopher of his time was established with the publication of his first three books: Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907). The contemporary resurgence of interest in Bergson has concentrated on themes from these texts, but has neglected two aspects of Bergson's thought, namely his last great book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1912) and the political, religious and social implications of his earlier work. This collection of essays corrects these oversights. Drawing largely on Two Sources, but also on Bergson's broader corpus, the book develops his thought toward pressing and cross-disciplinary problems in contemporary theory such as the relationship between the political and theological, the role of life within the human sciences, the importance of emotions in practical philosophy, the potential and limits of human rights, and the implications of a creative concept of time for both politics and religion. >