Henri Bergson: Creative Evolution

Henri Bergson: The Possible and the Real

Leibniz: The Monadology

Being in the world: from Plato to Heidegger

Lee Smolin: space and time

The Boltzmann brain paradox

Satie’s furniture music

We have far more than five senses

Consciousness and creation: the neuroscience of perception

Henri Bergson on why our world is built of objects and space

Immanuel Kant believed that spatiality lies at the bedrock of our understanding of the world, as we have an intuitive sense of space but no ability to detect it in the absence of objects within it. Thus, on top of this sense of space, all other facets of understanding must inevitably be built. In his landmark work Creative Evolution (1907), the French philosopher Henri Bergson diverges from Kant, arguing that our intellect evolved in tandem with our sense of space, with the ability to understand the world in terms of discrete phenomena separated by space helping us to survive. In this experimental short for Epoché Magazine, the Australian writer and composer John C Brady pairs excerpts from Creative Evolution with visual motifs that toy with space and a haunting piano score, making for a mesmerising dance of images, music and ideas.

Video by Epoché Magazine

videoThinkers and theories

Henri Bergson on why the existence of things precedes their possibility

videoBeauty and aesthetics

Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art

Simple entities in universal harmony – Leibniz’s evocative perspective on reality

videoHistory of ideas

I am, therefore I think – how Heidegger radically reframed being

Time is fundamental, space is emergent – why physicists are rethinking reality

videoLogic and probability

Is it more likely you’re a person with a past, or an ephemeral brain in a void?

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Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer

Aristotle was wrong and so are we: there are far more than five senses

On the ‘beholder’s share’ – how past experience influences our perception of art

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