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Author: Jimena Canales Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400865778 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 488
Book Description
The explosive debate that transformed our views about time and scientific truth On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson's theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein's theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted on to science, one that ignored the intuitive aspects of time. The Physicist and the Philosopher tells the remarkable story of how this explosive debate transformed our understanding of time and drove a rift between science and the humanities that persists today. Jimena Canales introduces readers to the revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Bergson, describes how they dramatically collided in Paris, and traces how this clash of worldviews reverberated across the twentieth century. She shows how it provoked responses from figures such as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger, and carried repercussions for American pragmatism, logical positivism, phenomenology, and quantum mechanics. Canales explains how the new technologies of the period—such as wristwatches, radio, and film—helped to shape people’s conceptions of time and further polarized the public debate. She also discusses how Bergson and Einstein, toward the end of their lives, each reflected on his rival’s legacy—Bergson during the Nazi occupation of Paris and Einstein in the context of the first hydrogen bomb explosion. The Physicist and the Philosopher is a magisterial and revealing account that shows how scientific truth was placed on trial in a divided century marked by a new sense of time.
Author: Jimena Canales Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400865778 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 488
Book Description
The explosive debate that transformed our views about time and scientific truth On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson's theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein's theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted on to science, one that ignored the intuitive aspects of time. The Physicist and the Philosopher tells the remarkable story of how this explosive debate transformed our understanding of time and drove a rift between science and the humanities that persists today. Jimena Canales introduces readers to the revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Bergson, describes how they dramatically collided in Paris, and traces how this clash of worldviews reverberated across the twentieth century. She shows how it provoked responses from figures such as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger, and carried repercussions for American pragmatism, logical positivism, phenomenology, and quantum mechanics. Canales explains how the new technologies of the period—such as wristwatches, radio, and film—helped to shape people’s conceptions of time and further polarized the public debate. She also discusses how Bergson and Einstein, toward the end of their lives, each reflected on his rival’s legacy—Bergson during the Nazi occupation of Paris and Einstein in the context of the first hydrogen bomb explosion. The Physicist and the Philosopher is a magisterial and revealing account that shows how scientific truth was placed on trial in a divided century marked by a new sense of time.
Author: Alessandra Campo Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110753723 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 498
Book Description
This book brings together papers from a conference that took place in the city of L'Aquila, 4–6 April 2019, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the earthquake that struck on 6 April 2009. Philosophers and scientists from diverse fields of research debated the problem that, on 6 April 1922, divided Einstein and Bergson: the nature of time. For Einstein, scientific time is the only time that matters and the only time we can rely on. Bergson, however, believes that scientific time is derived by abstraction, even in the sense of extraction, from a more fundamental time. The plurality of times envisaged by the theory of Relativity does not, for him, contradict the philosophical intuition of the existence of a single time. But how do things stand today? What can we say about the relationship between the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of time in the light of contemporary science? What do quantum mechanics, biology and neuroscience teach us about the nature of time? The essays collected here take up the question that pitted Einstein against Bergson, science against philosophy, in an attempt to reverse the outcome of their monologue in two voices, with a multilogue in several voices.
Author: Henri Bergson Publisher: ISBN: Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
This philosophical text deals with the theme of time. A central contention is that science and philosophy alike systematically misrepresent the nature of time. Bergson suggests that the traditional association between the model of space and time is incoherent. Unlike space, time is not measurable by objective standard. This contention is tried out against the major movement in physics of the day - relativity. Tracing the development of the theory from special to general relativity, Bergson finds that a fundamental requirement of the theory is an impossibility - the assumption that the experiences of two observers moving at different speeds within two different physical systems might be thought of as simultaneous. This is to ignore the limits of possible experience.
Author: Mark Sinclair Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429665261 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 706
Book Description
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) is widely regarded as one of the most original and important philosophers of the twentieth century. His work explored a rich panoply of subjects, including time, memory, free will and humour and we owe the popular term élan vital to a fundamental insight of Bergson’s. His books provoked responses from some of the leading thinkers and philosophers of his time, including Albert Einstein, William James and Bertrand Russell, and he is acknowledged as a fundamental influence on Marcel Proust. The Bergsonian Mind is an outstanding, wide-ranging volume covering the major aspects of Bergson’s thought, from his early influences to his continued relevance and legacy. Thirty-six chapters by an international team of leading Bergson scholars are divided into five clear parts: Sources and Scene Mind and World Ethics and Politics Reception Bergson and Contemporary Thought. In these sections fundamental topics are examined, including time, freedom and determinism, memory, perception, evolutionary theory, pragmatism and art. Bergson’s impact beyond philosophy is also explored in chapters on Bergson and spiritualism, physics, biology, cinema and post-colonial thought. An indispensable resource for anyone in Philosophy studying and researching Bergson’s work, The Bergsonian Mind will also interest those in related disciplines, such as Literature, Religion, Sociology and French Studies.
Author: Arthur I Miller Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0786723130 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
The most important scientist of the twentieth century and the most important artist had their periods of greatest creativity almost simultaneously and in remarkably similar circumstances. This fascinating parallel biography of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso as young men examines their greatest creations -- Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Einstein's special theory of relativity. Miller shows how these breakthroughs arose not only from within their respective fields but from larger currents in the intellectual culture of the times. Ultimately, Miller shows how Einstein and Picasso, in a deep and important sense, were both working on the same problem.
Author: Jimena Canales Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226093204 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn’t until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, the impact on modern science and society was profound. Revealing the history behind this infinitesimal interval, A Tenth of a Second sheds new light on modernity and illuminates the work of important thinkers of the last two centuries. Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of modern technologies—telegraphy, photography, cinematography—Jimena Canales locates the reverberations of this “perceptual moment” throughout culture. Once scientists associated the tenth of a second with the speed of thought, they developed reaction time experiments with lasting implications for experimental psychology, physiology, and optics. Astronomers and physicists struggled to control the profound consequences of results that were a tenth of a second off. And references to the interval were part of a general inquiry into time, consciousness, and sensory experience that involved rethinking the contributions of Descartes and Kant. Considering its impact on much longer time periods and featuring appearances by Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Albert Einstein, among others, A Tenth of a Second is ultimately an important contribution to history and a novel perspective on modernity.
Author: Émile Meyerson Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9400952112 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 314
Book Description
When the author of Identity and Reality accepted Langevin's suggestion that Meyerson "identify the thought processes" of Einstein's relativity theory, he turned from his assured perspective as historian of the sciences to the risky bias of contemporary philosophical critic. But Emile Meyerson, the epis temologist as historian, could not find a more rigorous test of his conclusions from historical learning than the interpretation of Einstein's work, unless perhaps he were to turn from the classical revolution of Einstein's relativity to the non-classical quantum theory. Meyerson captures our sympathy in all his writings: " . . . the role of the epistemologist is . . . in following the development of science" (250); the study of the evolution of reason leads us to see that "man does not experience himself reasoning . . . which is carried on unconsciously," and as the summation of his empirical studies of the works and practices of scientists, "reason . . . behaves in an altogether predict able way: . . . first by making the consequent equivalent to the antecedent, and then by actually denying all diversity in space" (202). If logic - and to Meyerson the epistemologist is logician - is to understand reason, then "logic proceeds a posteriori. " And so we are faced with an empirically based Par menides, and, as we shall see, with an ineliminable 'irrational' within science. Meyerson's story, written in 1924, is still exciting, 60 years later.
Author: Edward Baring Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139503235 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 350
Book Description
In this powerful study Edward Baring sheds fresh light on Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential yet controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Reading Derrida from a historical perspective and drawing on new archival sources, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy shows how Derrida's thought arose in the closely contested space of post-war French intellectual life, developing in response to Sartrian existentialism, religious philosophy and the structuralism that found its base at the École Normale Supérieure. In a history of the philosophical movements and academic institutions of post-war France, Baring paints a portrait of a community caught between humanism and anti-humanism, providing a radically new interpretation of the genesis of deconstruction and of one of the most vibrant intellectual moments of modern times.
Author: Sanford Kwinter Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262611817 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
An exploration of twentieth-century conceptions of time and their relation to artistic form. In Architectures of Time, Sanford Kwinter offers a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts. Tracing the transformation of twentieth-century epistemology to the rise of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Kwinter explains how the demise of the concept of absolute time, and of the classical notion of space as a fixed background against which things occur, led to field theory and a physics of the "event." He suggests that the closed, controlled, and mechanical world of physics gave way to the approximate, active, and qualitative world of biology as a model of both scientific and metaphysical explanation. Kwinter examines theory of time and space in Einstein's theories of relativity and shows how these ideas were reflected in the writings of the sculptor Umberto Boccioni, the town planning schema of the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He argues that the writings of Boccioni and the visionary architecture of Sant'Elia represent the earliest and most profound deployments of the concepts of field and event. In discussing Kafka's work, he moves away from the thermodynamic model in favor of the closely related one of Bergsonian duree, or virtuality. He argues that Kafka's work manifests a coherent cosmology that can be understood only in relation to the constant temporal flux that underlies it.
Author: Jimena Canales
Author: Jimena Canales
Author: Alessandra Campo
Author: Henri Bergson
Author: Mark Sinclair
Author: Arthur I Miller
Author: Jimena Canales
Author: Henri Bergson
Author: Émile Meyerson
Author: Edward Baring
Author: Sanford Kwinter