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Henri Bergson and William James on Vicious Intellectualism

April 15, 2014 by David Buchanan 16 Comments

"If I had not read Bergson," William James wrote in A Pluralistic Universe, "I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper privately." James had been engaged in a very long philosophical debate with the leading Idealists of his day, F.H. Bradley and Josiah Royce, when Bergson came to the rescue. James thought that Bergson supplied him with the concepts he needed  Continue Reading …

Episode 92: Henri Bergson on How to Do Metaphysics

April 11, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer 60 Comments

On "An Introduction to Metaphysics" (1903) How does metaphysics differ from science? While Kant had dismissed metaphysics as groundless speculation about things beyond human knowledge, Bergson sees it as a matter of grasping things "from the inside." He calls this "intuition": the kind of understanding we have of our own inner lives. If you try to describe this with concepts  Continue Reading …

Episode 92: Henri Bergson on How to Do Metaphysics

April 11, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

On "An Introduction to Metaphysics" (1903) How does metaphysics differ from science? While Kant had dismissed metaphysics as groundless speculation about things beyond human knowledge, Bergson sees it as a matter of grasping things "from the inside." He calls this "intuition": the kind of understanding we have of our own inner lives. If you try to describe this with concepts  Continue Reading …

Precognition of Ep. 92: Henri Bergson

March 30, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

Guest Matt Teichman (from the Elucidations podcast) introduces Bergson's essay "An Introduction to Metaphysics." Read more about the topic at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Listen to the episode.  Continue Reading …

Topic for #92 (and a Not School Group): Henri Bergson

March 4, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

Listen to Matt Teichman's introduction to the reading. Listen to the episode. Henri Bergson is an early 20th century French philosopher that PEL listeners may recall from our philosophy of humor episode, and we'll be tackling his philosophy proper via the entrance drug "An Introduction to Metaphysics," a short essay from 1903 (freely available online) that is essentially  Continue Reading …

Humor as Epoché: Irony and Hypothesis

June 27, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 4 Comments

Near the end of our humor episode, I threw out the truism that humor tends to deal with something we're uncomfortable with, like death, sex, or embarrassment itself. The example I gave was of someone like Ed Conard making jokes about being rich. Now, I've since seen Conard on the Daily Show, and while he was good natured enough, I see no evidence that he would have the  Continue Reading …

In Defense of the Expectation Thesis

June 13, 2012 by PhilosophyBro 2 Comments

[Editor's note: We're happy here to get a contribution on humor from Philosophy Bro who was on our recent Wittgenstein episodes. Give him a nice round of applause.] I think that "funny" is one of those words that you're going to have a real bad time trying to delimit or explain entirely. But, uh... fuck it. Here goes. In Wittgensteinian fashion, I mean them with the implicit  Continue Reading …

Deeply Funny?

June 10, 2012 by David Buchanan Leave a Comment

(Image: Tom Motley when he's all spiffed up.) It is a little known fact, even among our philosophically sophisticated readers, that Heidegger argued for the supremacy of German humor. Because German jokes have the most precise underlying structure, he argued, German humor would rule the earth for a thousand years. (Sorry if you've already heard some version of that old  Continue Reading …

Humor Case Study 2: Henny Youngman

June 9, 2012 by Seth Paskin 2 Comments

So Mark took on the comedy stylings of Louis CK in the first case study, someone who establishes a core insight and then plays it out through both content and performance.  I'd like to take a look at two other (multi-generational!) comedians who rely on establishing a premise quickly using audience assumptions and then make a joke by twisting either the meaning of words or  Continue Reading …

Humor Case Study: Louie CK

June 8, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

We mentioned Louie CK on the episode in the context of his body image bits, but since he's not a paradigm case of that (meaning it's not his only shtick), we didn't pursue it. So here's a piece from I chose semi-randomly for us to discuss, having to do with kid naming and in general dealing with your offspring: Watch on YouTube. So he has this core insight about naming  Continue Reading …

Humor and Imagination (and Humor vs. Good Humor)

June 4, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

One point I had intended to make during the episode was about the role of the imagination in aesthetic appreciation, including appreciation of humor. One distinction that Bergson glossed over and which we weren't very consistent about making is the difference between "falling within the category of humor" and "actually being funny." This came through a bit in our discussion of  Continue Reading …

PREVIEW-Episode 57: Henri Bergson on Humor

May 31, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 35 Comments

Henri Bergson

This is a short preview of the full episode. Buy Now Purchase this episode for $2.99. Or become a PEL Citizen for $5 a month, and get access to this and all other paywalled episodes, including 68 back catalogue episodes; exclusive Part 2's for episodes published after September, 2020; and our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat more  Continue Reading …

Episode 57: Henri Bergson on Humor (Citizens Only)

May 31, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

On Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900). What is humor? Bergson says that, fundamentally, we laugh as a form of social corrective when others are slow to adapt to society's demands. Other types of humor are derivative from this: just as the clown falls on his face because of a (pretended) physical flaw, as if he's a machine that doesn't work and so  Continue Reading …

Topic for #57: Henri Bergson on Humor

May 3, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 11 Comments

Here's the episode. What is humor? Henri Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900) states that humor is a social tool by which we mildly scold each other for being insufficiently adaptive and flexible. On this account, the paradigm of humor is the absent-minded person, but any form of idiocy or freakishness or social ineptness also works: what's funny  Continue Reading …

Daniel Coffeen on Bergson’s Matter and Memory

December 6, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

One of the name-drops on the Sartre episode is Henri Bergson, a philosopher who was in vogue in France at the time Sartre wrote, famous among other things for promoting and anti-atomic epistemology. Kant, for instance, thought that we get our idea of number out of time, meaning that time is essentially something we can count. For Bergson, time is a flow: if we break it up for  Continue Reading …

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