Roy Wood Sellars
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| - | '''Henri-Louis Bergson''' ([[October 18]], [[1859]]–[[January 4]], [[1941]]) was a major [[French philosopher]], influential in the first half of the 20th century. | ||
| - | == Criticisms and reception == | ||
| - | From his first publications, Bergson's philosophy attracted strong criticism from different angles, although he was also very popular and durably influenced [[French philosophy]] — the [[epistemology|epistemologist]] [[Gaston Bachelard]], for example, explicitly alluded to him in the last pages of his 1938 book (The Formation of the Scientific Mind). The mathematician [[Edouard Le Roy]] was Bergson's main disciple. Others influences count [[Vladimir Jankélévitch]], who wrote a book on him (''Henri Bergson'') in 1931, [[Pierre Teilhard de Chardin]] or [[Gilles Deleuze]] who wrote ''Le bergsonisme'' in 1966 (transl. 1988). Bergson is also often classified as an influence upon the [[process philosophy]] of (beside Deleuze) [[Alfred North Whitehead]], as well as the [[phenomenology]] of [[Merleau-Ponty]] and [[Emmanuel Lévinas]]. | + | '''Roy Wood Sellars''' (1880 – September 5, 1973) was an American philosopher of [[critical realism]] and [[religious humanism]], and a proponent of [[emergent evolution]]. His son was the philosopher [[Wilfrid Sellars]]. For much of his career he taught at the [[University of Michigan]]. |
| - | Many writers of the early 20th century criticized his [[intuitionism]], indeterminism, [[psychologism]] and unique interpretation of the scientific impulse. Among those who explicitly criticized Bergson (either in published articles or letters) were [[Bertrand Russell]] (see his short book on the subject), [[George Santayana]] (see his study on the author in "Winds of Doctrine"), [[G. E. Moore]], [[Ludwig Wittgenstein]], [[Julien Benda]] (see his book on the subject), [[T. S. Eliot]], [[Paul Valéry]] (despite some recent claims otherwise), [[Andre Gide]] (see below), Marxists philosophers such as [[Theodor W. Adorno]] (see "Against Epistemology"), [[Lucio Colletti]] (see "Hegel and Marxism"), , [[Jean-Paul Sartre]] (see his early book ''Imagination'' — although Sartre also appropriated himself Bergsonian thesis on novelty as pure creation - see ''Situations I'', Gallimard 1947, p.314) and [[Georges Politzer]] (see the latter's two books on the subject: ''Le Bergsonisme, une Mystification Philosophique'' and ''La fin d'une parade philosophique: le Bergsonisme'' both of which had a tremendous effect on French [[existential]] [[phenomenology]]), as well as (the non-Marxist) [[Maurice Blanchot]] (see ''Bergson and Symbolism''), American philosophers such as [[Irving Babbitt]], [[Arthur Lovejoy]], [[Josiah Royce]], [[The New Realists]] ([[Ralph B. Perry]], [[E. B. Holt]], and [[William P. Montague]]), The Critical Realists (Durant Drake, [[Roy W. Sellars]], C. A. Strong, and A. K. Rogers), [[Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler]], [[Roger Fry]] (see his letters), [[Julian Huxley]] (in ''[[Evolution: The Modern Synthesis]]'') and [[Virginia Woolf]] (for the latter, see Ann Banfield, ''The Phantom Table''). | + | In his 1967 book, ''[http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/sellarsrefl-0.html Reflections on American Philosophy From Within]'' he described his views on [[materialism]] as evolutionary materialism, an extension to his 1922 groundbreaking book ''Evolutionary Naturalism''. |
| - | Bergson was accused by the Vatican of being [[pantheism|pantheistic]], while [[freethought|free-thinkers]], who formed a large part of the teachers and professors of the [[French Third Republic]], accused him of [[spiritualism]]. Still others have characterized his philosophy as a [[Emergent materialism|materialist emergentism]] — [[Samuel Alexander]] and [[C. Lloyd Morgan]] explicitly claimed Bergson as their forebearer. According to Henri Hude (1990, II, p.142), who supports himself on the whole of Bergson's works as well as his now published courses, accusing him of pantheism is a "counter-sense". Hude alleges that a [[mysticism|mystical experience]], roughly outlined at the end of ''Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion'', is the inner principle of his whole philosophy, although this has been contested by other commentators. | + | He helped draft the [[Humanist Manifesto]] in 1933. |
| - | [[C. S. Peirce]] took strong exception to being aligned with Bergson. In response to a letter comparing his work with that of Bergson he wrote, “a man who seeks to further science can hardly commit a greater sin than to use the terms of his science without anxious care to use them with strict accuracy; it is not very gratifying to my feelings to be classed along with a Bergson who seems to be doing his prettiest to muddle all distinctions.” William James’s students resisted the assimilation of his work to that of Bergson’s. See, for example, [[Horace Kallen]]’s book on the subject ''James and Bergson''. As [[Jean Wahl]] described the “ultimate disagreement” between James and Bergson in his ''System of Metaphysics'': | + | ==See also== |
| - | <blockquote>“for James, the consideration of action is necessary for the definition of truth, according to Bergson, action...must be kept from our mind if we want to see the truth.” Gide even went so far as to say that future historians will over-estimate Bergson’s influence on art and philosophy just because he was the self-appointed spokesman for “the spirit of the age.”</blockquote> | + | *[[American philosophy]] |
| - | As early as the 1890s, Santayana attacked certain key concepts in Bergson’s philosophy, above all his view of the New and the indeterminate: | + | *[[List of American philosophers]] |
| - | <blockquote>“the possibility of a new and unaccountable fact appearing at any time,” he writes in his book on [[Lotze]], “does not practically affect the method of investigation;...the only thing given up is the hope that these hypotheses may ever be adequate to the reality and cover the process of nature without leaving a remainder. This is no great renunciation; for that consummation of science...is by no one really expected.”</blockquote> | + | |
| - | According to Santayana and Russell, Bergson projected false claims onto the aspirations of scientific method, which Bergson needed to make in order to justify his prior moral commitment to freedom. Russell takes particular exception to Bergson’s understanding of number in chapter two of ''Time and Free-will''. According to Russell, Bergson uses an outmoded spatial metaphor (“extended images”) to describe the nature of mathematics as well as logic in general. “Bergson only succeeds in making his theory of number possible by confusing a particular collection with the number of its terms, and this again with number in general,” writes Russell (see ''The Philosophy of Bergson'' and ''A History of Western Philosophy''). | ||
| - | Further still, the [[élan vital]] was seen to be a projection of the inner life, a moral feeling, onto the world at large. The external world, according to certain theories of [[probability]], provides less and less indeterminism with further refinement of scientific method. In brief, the moral, psychological, and aesthethic demand for the new, the underivable and the unexplained should not be confused with our imagination of the universe at large. A difference remains between our inner sense of becoming and the non-human character of the outer world, which, according to the ancient materialist [[Lucretius]] should not be characterized as either one of becoming or being, creation or destruction (''[[De Rerum Natura]]''). | ||
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| - | ==Bibliography== | ||
| - | * ''[[Time and Free Will|Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness]]'' 1910. (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience 1889) Dover Publications 2001: ISBN 0-486-41767-0–Bergson's doctoral dissertation | ||
| - | * ''[[Matter and Memory]]'' 1911. (Matière et mémoire 1896) Zone Books 1990: ISBN 0-942299-05-1, Dover Publications 2004: ISBN 0-486-43415-X | ||
| - | * ''[[Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic]]'' 1901. (Le rire) Green Integer 1998: ISBN 1-892295-02-4, Dover Publications 2005: ISBN 0-486-44380-9 | ||
| - | * ''[[Creative Evolution (book)|Creative Evolution]]'' 1910. (L'Evolution créatrice 1907) University Press of America 1983: ISBN 0-8191-3553-4, Dover Publications 1998: ISBN 0-486-40036-0, Kessinger Publishing 2003: ISBN 0-7661-4732-0, Cosimo 2005: ISBN 1-59605-309-7 | ||
| - | * ''Mind-energy'' 1920. (L'Energie spirituelle 1919) McMillan.–a collection of essays and lectures | ||
| - | * ''Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe'' 1922. Clinamen Press Ltd. ISBN 1-903083-01-X | ||
| - | * ''The Two Sources of Morality and Religion'' 1932. {Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion) University of Notre Dame Press 1977: ISBN 0-268-01835-9 | ||
| - | * ''[[The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics]]'' 1946. (La Pensée et le mouvant 1934) Citadel Press 2002: ISBN 0-8065-2326-3–essay collection, sequel to ''Mind-Energy'', including 1903's "An Introduction to Metaphysics" | ||
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| - | ==See also== | ||
| - | *[[Duration (Bergson)|Duration]] | ||
| - | *[[Intuition (Bergson)|Intuition]] | ||
| - | *[[Élan vital]] | ||
| - | *[[Philosophy of biology]] | ||
| - | *[[Process philosophy]] | ||
| - | *[[Alfred North Whitehead]] | ||
| - | *[[William James]] | ||
| - | *[[Gilles Deleuze]] | ||
| - | *[[Charles Peguy]] | ||
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Roy Wood Sellars (1880 – September 5, 1973) was an American philosopher of critical realism and religious humanism, and a proponent of emergent evolution. His son was the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars. For much of his career he taught at the University of Michigan.
In his 1967 book, Reflections on American Philosophy From Within he described his views on materialism as evolutionary materialism, an extension to his 1922 groundbreaking book Evolutionary Naturalism.
He helped draft the Humanist Manifesto in 1933.
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