La prochaine séance de l’Atelier Bergson aura lieu sur Zoom le 12 avril 2023 de 14h à 16h30 (CET)

Lien Zoom : https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/95096060568?pwd=ek43aEpvYmFocGFOejlqc0tKdkd2UT09

Meeting ID: 950 9606 0568
mot de passe: hqxn4

Mélanie Weill (chercheuse indépendante) : Life and education: the influence of bergsonism on Montessori pedagogy

In the aftermath of the First World War, a great movement aiming to reform education took place in Europe, called “new” or “alternative” or “active” education. The new educators questioned the authoritarian way teachers related to their students in the 19^th century, defended children’s rights, and renewed the notions of what it is to learn and to teach. Reading the works of medical doctor and pedagogue Maria Montessori, I noticed the repeated presence of bergsonian vocabulary. In the introduction of The formation of man (1949), an overview of her life’s work, the major figure of New Education places Bergson’s most famous concept at the heart of her pedagogy, stating that “Our first teacher will be (…) theélan vital”. In this talk I will defend the idea that a lot of aspects of New Education can be seen as practical applications of Bergson’s philosophy. 

Liselott-Mariett Olsson (Associate Professor in Pedagogy, Malmö University) : Becoming Pedagogue: Bergson and the Aesthetics of Early Childhood Education and Care

Throughout the history of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), aesthetics has played a prominent role, and it has been practically and theoretically treated as concerning the relation between matter and mind in a non-dualistic and integrated way. However, in the contemporary educational situation the aesthetic dimension is neglected, and the components of the relation are no longer “held together” (Olsson 2023). A certain kind of “abstract formalism” (Løvlie 2007), expressed not the least in ever-growing “neuromania” (Vandenbroeck et al. 2017) and “standards and accountability movements” (Taubman 2009) in ECEC, has taken over the discourse on education, obliterating the aesthetic dimension and relation as well as pedagogical practices and theories connected to these.

To address this, some decisive parts of Bergson’s major work Matter and Memory (1896/1991) are of value and use, not the least the critique of epiphenomenalism and parallelism in neuroscientific explanations of the human mind, as well as the critical and creative account of the relation between matter and mind herein displayed. Bergson approaches the problem by showing how the dualism between mind and matter becomes settled when space is allowed to intervene and through perception produce a distance and a division between mind and matter – between “our mind” and “our body” (including our material brain) as well as between “our mind” and “things”. This spatialized vision is due to how perception is directed towards action that pragmatically and reductively deforms matter. This, however, is not the only or even the true nature of matter and the quest that Bergson begins with this book concerns therefore to restore to matter (including our own body and its brain) its “ultimate reality”[1] (Worms 2013:112, my translation). The main thesis is double: “the critique of space is extended to the perception of matter, leading to a metaphysics of duration, that in turn is extended to the reality of matter[2] (Worms 2013a:113, my translation).

In this presentation I will further explore this thesis and its potential synergies with the aesthetics of ECEC by proceeding through three movements: 1) critically identifying abstract formalism as a badly stated problem in ECEC, 2) making an inventory of some pedagogical-aesthetical practices and theories in ECEC, and 3) suggesting some creative and contemporary contributions for how to practically and theoretically re-activate aesthetics in ECEC.

REFERENCES:

Bergson, H. (1896/1991) Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books.

Løvlie, L. (2007) The pedagogy of place, Nordisk Pedagogik, 27 (1), 32-36. https://doi.org/10.18261/ISSN1891-5949-2007-01-03

Olsson, L. M. (2023) Becoming Pedagogue – Bergson and the Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics of Early Childhood Education and Care. London & New York: Routledge.

Taubman, P. M. (2009). Teaching by numbers: Deconstructing the discourse of standards and accountability in education. New York: Routledge.

Vandenbroeck. M., DeVos J., Fias, W., Olsson, L. M., Penn, H., Wastell, D., and White, S. (2017) Constructions of neuroscience in early childhood education. London: Routledge.

Worms, F. (2013 2^e éd.) Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

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[1] réalité ultime 

[2] la critique de l’espace, étendue à la perception de la matière, conduit à une métaphysique de la durée, elle-même étendue à la réalité de la matière

Chair : Maria Adriana Camargo Cappello (Universidade Federal do Paraná)

Séminaire de recherche international

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Organised by the project ‘Science, Literature and Research’, funded by the Kone Foundation, at the University of Helsinki

What explains the renewed interest in Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time, memory and creative evolution at the start of the twenty-first century? Having been dismissed as a “serious philosopher” in the post-Second World war period – in no small part as a consequence of the celebrity status of this philosopher, who is said to have caused the first traffic jam on Broadway with his 1913 lecture at Columbia – the revival of Bergson in the anglophone world owed much to the English translation of Gilles Deleuze’ 1966 essay on Bergsonism in 1988. This event was soon accompanied by a resurgence of anti-Bergsonism in the context of science wars in the following decade, prompted by the alleged mistreatment of natural science by postmodern philosophers. The ‘Sokal affair’ and the book Intellectual Impostures (1998) by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont amounted to a warning that philosophers should not meddle in scientific affairs out of their reach – Bergson’s conversation with Einstein in 1922 was invoked as a warning example – or concern themselves too much with the implications of contemporary science for our worldview.

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Dans le cadre de du projet IRN du CNRS sur le Bergsonisme dans l’histoire globale de la philosophie, un séminaire Zoom organisé par Mathilde Tahar et Caterina Zanfi consacré aux recherches bergsoniennes internationales les plus actuelles aura lieu sur Zoom à partir de Janvier 2022. 

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Of all the philosophies of the early 20^th century, Bergsonism has known the widest diffusion, creating a true global intellectual movement, producing local interpretations and new semantizations of Bergson’s thought. The Global Bergsonism research project aims to produce, via local chapters, a global history of Bergsonism, considered as an emblematic case of philosophical transfer.

In November 2021 a webinar will be hosted by Fukuoka University, in the framework of the CNRS IRN project “Un chapitre dans l’histoire globale de la philosophie. Nouvelles perspectives sur le bergsonisme” and in synergy with the “Project Bergson in Japan” (PBJ) led by Japanese Bergsonian scholars, to focus on Bergson studies in the East Asian area.

We are happy to present the programme below

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Dates: July 29, 30.
Time: JST: 17:00-19:00, 21:00-23:00.
Place: Zoom, virtually London (Registeration Required)
Organizers: Project Bergson in Japan and Barry Dainton

PROGRAMME

THURSDAY 29

17:00-19:00, Chair: Barry Dainton
Yaron Wolf, Coinciding with Time’s Flow: from Perception to the Manifest Image
Yasushi Hirai, Bergson on Causality

21:00-23:00, Chair: Hisashi Fujita
Kaoru Kamiyama, Bergson on Sympathy
Anne Sophie Meincke, With Bergson Towards a New Bio-Processual Metaphysics of Free Will or: Why Contemporary Philosophers of Free Will Ought to Read Bergson

FRIDAY 30

17:00-19:00, Chair: Tatsuya Murayama
Barry Dainton, Unity and Irreducibility
Hisashi Fujita, On Personality: Analytical and Bergsonian Approaches

21:00-23:00, Chair: Yasushi Hirai
Tatsuya Murayama, Bergson on the Indefinability of Freedom
General Discussion

Register here
Contact: hiraiya@fukuoka-u.ac.jp

 

L’Assemblée Générale de la Société des amis de Bergson se tiendra le vendredi 2 octobre 2020 de 14 heures à 15 heures CEST (heure de Paris), en ligne. Seuls les membres de la SAB auront accès au lien de la réunion. Vous pouvez adhérer ici. 

Ordre du jour:

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Note 1: Participation in the Webinar is by invitation only. In order to receive the invitation for the Webinar, please email Leonard Lawlor, lul19@psu.edu, or Ted Bergsma, tzb5226@psu.edu.

Note 2: All times below are Eastern Standard Time (EST) for the USA and Canada

 

Program

Friday, November 6

Welcome comments 8:45 am

Session 1

Keynote

9:00-11:00 am

Moderator: Leonard Lawlor, Penn State University, USA

Frédéric Worms, École normale supérieure, rue d’Ulm, France, Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago: “Global Bergsonism”

 

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Christophe Labaune Archiviste au Collège de France

Notre but dans ce séminaire est de mettre en évidence une dimension essentielle de la philosophie de Bergson, ainsi que d’en explorer sa fertilité: l’affirmation de la relation intrinsèque entre corps propre (ou subjectif), son indétermination et la vie. Penser une telle relation, dépend de la nouvelle conception du mouvement que sa métaphysique développe. Elle fonde aussi la possibilité de penser la création de manière concrète, en insérant la philosophie bergsonienne dans un domaine thématique que nous cherchons à délimiter.

Séance 1 : mardi 4 février, 16h-18h, salle Pasteur (pavillon Pasteur, 1er étage)

Séance 2 : jeudi 6 février, 16h-18h, salle Pasteur (pavillon Pasteur, 1er étage)

Séance 3 : mercredi 26 février, 16h-18h, salle Cavaillès (1er étage)

Séance 4 : jeudi 27 février, 16h-18h, salle Celan (rez-de-chaussée)

Plus d’informations