An untimely intuition: adding a bergsonian dimension to experience and education

Educational Theory

Volumn 55, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 443-459

  Roy, Kaustuv ^a  

^a LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 38149140136     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2005.00005.x     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Carol Publishing, 1992), 110.
2. John Dewey, John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 12, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 206.
3. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1916; repr. New York: The Free Press, 1944).
4. Dewey, The Middle Works, 124-155.
5. See also John Dewey, V. Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch and Co., 1934);
6. and John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1938).
7. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976).
8. See also William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983).
9. William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1919), 264.
10. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: St. Martin's, 1965). Kant wrote, "And while concepts, which belong to the understanding, are brought into play through the relation of the manifold to the unity of apperception, it is only by means of the imagination that they can be brought into relation to sensible intuition" (p. A124).
11. See also René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
12. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).
13. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
14. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basi Blackwell, 1968).
16. Nel Noddings and Paul J. Shore, Awakening the Inner Eye: Intuition in Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1984), 20.
17. Ibid.
18. Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (New York: Dover, 1954).
19. Noddings and Shore, Awakening the Inner Eye, 49.
20. Ibid.
21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
22. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (New York: Dover, 2001), 232. This work will be cited as TFW in the text for all subsequent references.
23. But is it not precisely this separation between time and space that Einstein's relativity theory had shown to be ultimately untenable? From Bergson's point of view, it is possible to argue that Einstein's relativistic equations depend on a universal constant - the speed of light - that itself depends on interacting with phenomena on a discrete and measurable plane, giving rise to a discrete rather than continuous description of reality. Thus, he concluded that there are available to the senses other ways of interacting with phenomena than the metric.
24. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 27.
25. For a striking example of this, see David Peat, Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm (New York: Helix Books, 1997). In this biography of the well-known physicist David Bohm, Peat records how moments of profound understanding of phenomena came to Bohm bodily, in a corpuscular way, rather than cognitively or symbolically. Peat also discusses how the question of time becomes central to Bohm's later thinking.
26. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 34.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 35.
29. Sri Aurobindo, Secret of the Veda (Twin Lakes, Wisconsin: Lotus Press, 1995).
30. Maricarmen Martínez, The Revolt Against Time: A Philosophical Approach to the Prose and Poetry of Quevedo and Bocá ngel (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2003).
31. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Books, 1988).
32. See Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature (New York: The Free Press, 1997).
33. Decomposition here refers to a shift in frame in which the measured instant reenters the flow and loses its fixed contours. More acute sensibilities make the usual temporal calibration lose its fierce hold on experience.
34. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 15.
35. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 74.
36. Ibid., 74.
37. The works of such diverse authors as Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, and VirginiaWoolf are examples of this challenge to time.
38. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1911), 236-237.
39. Dewey, Democracy and Education.
40. Arthur T. Winfree, When Time Breaks Down: The Three Dimensional Dynamics of Electrochemical Waves and Cardiac Arrhythmias (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 253.
41. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 28
42. James, V Talks to Teachers on Psychology, 16.
43. Dewey, Democracy and Education.
44. The justification for curricula is often provided in terms of its usefulness in the future - the making of a citizen or a worker - and not in terms of the very doing of it, as Dewey emphasized. See Dewey, Democracy and Education.
45. James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, 136-137.