The Psychoanalysis of Fire

The Psychoanalysis of Fire
Author: Gaston Bachelard
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 132
Release: 1987-01-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780807064610

"[Bachelard] is neither a self-confessed and tortured atheist like Satre, nor, like Chardin, a heretic combining a belief in God with a proficiency in modern science. But, within the French context, he is almost as important as they are because he has a pseudo-religious force, without taking a stand on religion. To define him as briefly as possible – he is a philosopher, with a professional training in the sciences, who devoted most of the second phase of his career to promoting that aspect of human nature which often seems most inimical to science: the poetic imagination ..." – J.G. Weightman, The New York Times Review of Books

The Dialectic of Duration

The Dialectic of Duration
Author: Gaston Bachelard
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2016-09-26
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1786600609

In The Dialectic of Duration, Gaston Bachelard addresses the nature of time in response to the writings of his great contemporary, Henri Bergson. The work is motivated by a refutation of Bergson’s notion of duration – ‘lived time’, experienced as continuous. For Bachelard, experienced time is irreducibly fractured and interrupted, as indeed are material events. At stake is an entire conception of the physical world, an entire approach to the philosophy of science. It was in this work that Bachelard first marshalled all the components of his visionary philosophy of science, with its steady insistence on the human context and subtle encompassing of the irrational within the rational. The Dialectic of Duration reaches far beyond local arguments over the nature of the physical world to gesture toward the building of an entirely new form of philosophy. Ongoing publication made possible through the generous support of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.

Water and Dreams

Water and Dreams
Author: Gaston Bachelard
Publisher: Dallas Institute Publications
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1999
Genre: Imagination
ISBN: 9780911005257

The Poetics of Space

The Poetics of Space
Author: Gaston Bachelard
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1994
Genre: Imagination
ISBN: 9780807064733

The classic book on how we experience intimate spaces. "A magical book. . . . A prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced-and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard." -from the foreword by John R. Stilgoe 6473-4 / $15.00tx / paperback

Atomistic Intuitions

Atomistic Intuitions
Author: Gaston Bachelard
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2018-08-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438471270

An English translation of the French philosopher’s sixth book, in which he seeks to develop a metaphysical context for modern atomistic science. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) is best known in the English-speaking world for his work on poetics and the literary imagination, but much of his oeuvre is devoted to epistemology and the philosophy of science. Like Thomas Kuhn, whose work he anticipates by three decades, Bachelard examines the revolution taking place in scientific thought, but with particular attention to the philosophical implications of scientific practice. Atomistic Intuitions, published in 1933, considers past atomistic doctrines as a context for proposing a metaphysics for the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century. As his subtitle indicates, in this book Bachelard proposes a classification of atomistic intuitions as they are transformed over the course of history. More than a mere taxonomy, this exploration of atomistic doctrines since antiquity proves to be keenly pedagogical, leading to an enriched philosophical appreciation of modern subatomic physics and chemistry as sciences of axioms. Though focused on philosophy of science, the perspectives and intuitions Bachelard garnered through this work provide a unique and even essential key to understanding his extensive writings on the imagination. Roch C. Smith’s translation and explanatory notes will help to make this aspect of Bachelard’s thought accessible to a wider readership, particularly in such fields as aesthetics, literature, and history.

Gaston Bachelard, Revised and Updated

Gaston Bachelard, Revised and Updated
Author: Roch C. Smith
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2016-06-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438461933

Gaston Bachelard, one of twentieth-century France's most original thinkers, is known by English-language readers primarily as the author of The Poetics of Space and several other books on the imagination, but he made significant contributions to the philosophy and history of science. In this book, Roch C. Smith provides a comprehensive introduction to Bachelard's work, demonstrating how his writings on the literary imagination can be better understood in the context of his exploration of how knowledge works in science. After an overview of Bachelard's writings on the scientific mind as it was transformed by relativity, quantum physics, and modern chemistry, Smith examines Bachelard's works on the imagination in light of particular intellectual values Bachelard derived from science. His trajectory from science to a specifically literary imagination is traced by recognizing his concern with what science teaches about how we know, and his increasing preoccupation with questions of being when dealing with poetic imagery. Smith also explores the material and dynamic imagination associated with the four elements—fire, water, air, and earth—and the phenomenology of creative imagination in Bachelard's Poetics of Space, his Poetics of Reverie, and in the fragments of Poetics of Fire.