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.