Wahida Khandker

The idea of the élan vital is crucial for an understanding of Bergson’s metaphysical method, underpinning the way in which philosophy stands with other forms of creative activity as an endeavour of “self-overcoming,” the self or subject no longer being at the centre of thought, but understood rather as a product of the process of thinking. In placing a special emphasis on Bergson’s 1907 work, Creative Evolution, the present essay is both an acknowledgement and challenge to the shift from early interpretations of Bergson in which comparisons were made with thinkers such as Schelling and Schopenhauer, to more recent engagements centred on the theories of perception and memory. The aim of this essay is to formulate a response to the marginalized status of Creative Evolution in the “perception-based” strands of Bergson scholarship, by emphasising how Bergson’s theories of memory and consciousness are a means for understanding his definition of evolutionary “creativity.” Bergson suggests that the analysis of consciousness or “will” can provide us with a way of thinking about this creative movement of life, which is not a concept of a “cause” or “origin” in the sense of a “state of nature” (substance, essence, or “being”), but rather the operation of pure tendency

Using animals for scientific research is a highly contentious issue that Continental philosophers engaging with 'the animal question' have been rightly accused of shying away from. Now, Wahida Khandker asks whether Continental approaches to animality and organic life will make us reconsider our treatment of non-human animals. By following its historical and philosophical development, she argues that the concept of 'pathological life' as a means of understanding organic life as a whole plays a pivotal role in refiguring the human-animal distinction. She explores the significance of this across philosophy and the life sciences through the work of a number of key thinkers of life and process, from Henri Bergson to Donna Haraway.

Whitehead calls for an extrication of the concept of nature from models of the body/subject, which is always engaged in a process of “extensive abstraction” or simplification, issuing forth our conceptions of serial time and divisible space. The incorporation of serial time into process (thereby unifying the sciences with philosophy) is commonly held to be a key distinction between Whitehead and the more “dualistic” thought of Henri Bergson. This essay examines the affinities between the two thinkers, with particular reference to their common espousal of the primacy of process and a fragmentation of the Kantian unity of subjectivity.

Whitehead calls for an extrication of the concept of nature from models of the body/subject, which is always engaged in a process of “extensive abstraction” or simplification, issuing forth our conceptions of serial time and divisible space. The incorporation of serial time into process (thereby unifying the sciences with philosophy) is commonly held to be a key distinction between Whitehead and the more “dualistic” thought of Henri Bergson. This essay examines the affinities between the two thinkers, with particular reference to their common espousal of the primacy of process and a fragmentation of the Kantian unity of subjectivity.