Henri Bergson

"Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic" is French philosopher Henri Bergson's treatise on laughter and the timeless role of comedy in human society. Originally published in three parts in French in 1900 and translated into English in 1924, Bergson makes three essential observations about laughter and comedy. First, that comedy is a necessary human behavior and acts as a sort of caricature or parody of essential human activities and behaviors....

The basic principles that Bergson articulates, especially his way of thinking about reality as a dynamic process and his view of human beings as creative and evolving, should be helpful to anyone who seeks to go beyond simply dealing with the practical demands of daily life and consider the nature of things. Of special importance is Bergson's claim that it is both possible and necessary to know from the inside rather than confining our attention to...

Before the dawn of history, mankind was engaged in the study of dreaming. The wise man among the ancients was preeminently the interpreter of dreams. The ability to interpret successfully or plausibly was the quickest road to royal favor, as Joseph and Daniel found it to be; failure to give satisfaction in this respect led to banishment from court or death. When a scholar laboriously translates a cuneiform tablet dug up from a Babylonian mound, where...

"Henri Bergson's The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1946) is a collection of essays and lectures concerning the nature of intuition, explaining how intuition can be used as a philosophical method. Intuition is described as a method of 'thinking in duration' which reflects the continuous flow of reality. Bergson distinguishes between intuitive and conceptual thinking, explaining how intuition and intellect may be combined to produce...