Henri Bergson was a French-Jewish philosopher and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, whose third major work, "Creative Evolution", provided an alternate explanation for Darwin's mechanism of evolution. First published in French in 1907 and translated into English in 1911, the work proposes an orthogenesis or progressive theory of evolution in which Bergson argues that organisms innately evolve towards an end goal. Bergson focuses on four key steps...

"All men by nature are actuated with the desire of knowledge," declared Aristotle. The philosopher's works are foundational to the history of science, and his treatise on metaphysics, or "first philosophy," is divided into sections on previous philosophical thought and theories; a refutation of skepticism; a demonstration of God's existence; an examination of the relation of metaphysics to the other sciences; an elucidation of the nature of the infinite;...

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian. He is an important figure in Western philosophy, and in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume first gained recognition and respect as a historian, but academic interest in Hume's work has in recent years centered on his philosophical writing. His "History of England" was the standard work on English history for many years, until Macaulay's "The History of England from the Accession...

First published in 1713, this work was designed as a vivid and persuasive presentation of the remarkable picture of reality that Berkeley had first presented two years earlier in his Principles of Human Knowledge. His central claim there, as here, was that physical things consist of nothing but ideas in minds-- that the world is not material but mental. Berkeley uses this thesis as the ground for a new argument for the existence of God, and the dialogue...

Presents the Lebanese poet and philosopher's inspirational essays on love, marriage, work, joy, sorrow, freedom, pain, teaching, friendship and death.

Explores anxiety and its conquest and the meaning of courage in the history of Western thought.

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,...

This book provides an account of the concept of the world, exploring its possibilities and limitations and engaging with current issues in politics and ecology. It focuses on five principal thinkers : Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida.

"Metaphysics is one of the traditional four main branches of philosophy, alongside ethics, logic and epistemology. It is also an area that continues to attract and hold a fascination for many people yet it is associated with being complex and abstract. For some it is associated with the mystical or religious. For others it is known through the metaphysical poets who talk of love and spirituality. This Very Short Introduction goes right to the heart...

The atmosphere of silence all around provided a faithful setting for Heidegger's philosophy. I could not help comparing it with the atmosphere I had encountered in the house of Professor Berdyaev near Paris and that of Professor Jaspers in Heidelberg. In every case, the external world faithfully reflected the world of the mind. In Berdyaev's case it was the spirit of communion; in Jaspers's that of spiritual engagement. But in Heidegger's case it...