Gaston Bachelard, Revised and Updated

Philosopher of Science and Imagination

Roch C. Smith

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781438461922, 9781438461915
• eBook ISBN: 9781438461939
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

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.

INDEX

Activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine, L’, 44, 45, 111

aestheticism, 96

air, imagination of, 27–28, 43, 85, 87–95

Air and Dreams, 87–95, 96, 148n8

Air et les songes, L’, 89

“Albert Flocon’s ‘Engraver’s Treatise’” (Bachelard), 139n3

alchemy, xxiii, 72, 106; alchemist, 81, 105, 106, 120

Althusser, Louis, xxi, xxiii, 152n5; and Marxism, xxvi, 135

Anglo-American philosophers, xxii

anima, 108, 118, 119–20, 123, 126, 130, 135

animus, 108, 119–20, 123, 130, 135

approximation, xxi, 5, 9, 10–15, 20, 21, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 36, 38, 42, 100, 124

archetype, 49, 69, 80, 96, 98, 107, 108, 115

architecture, xxv, xxvi

Ariadne, 109, 114, 149n16

Aristotle. See Logic

Association Internationale Gaston Bachelard. See International Gaston Bachelard Association

atom, the, 10, 20, 21, 43, 47, 48–52, 54, 101, 106. See also under space

Bachelard, Suzanne, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 151n10

Bachelard Translation Project/Series. See translation

Balzac, Honoré de, 87

Bar-sur-Aube, 4, 5, 7

Barthes, Roland, 4

Baudelairian correspondences, 68; “invitation to journey,” 92

Béguin, Albert, 4

Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 101

Bergson, Henri, 3, 53, 55, 57, 58, 144n6, 150n2

Boccali, Renato, 139n35

Bolyai, Janos, 25

Bonaparte, Marie, 3, 80

Bosco, Henri, 4, 122, 151n1

Breton, André, 103, 149n12

Brunetière, Ferdinand, 4

Brunschvicg, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chronology
• Introduction
• One: The Man and His Times
• Two: Early Epistemology
• Three: The New Scientific Mind
• Four: Fragmentation and the Temptation of Ontology
• Five: Fire, Water, and the Material Imagination
• Six: Air, Earth, and the Dynamic Imagination
• Seven: A Phenomenology of the Creative Imagination
• Eight: Toward a Complementary Approach to Criticism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover