Notes
Notes
1. Henri Bergson, The Philosophy of Poetry: The Genius of Lucretius, ed., trans., and in part recast by Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959).
2. Gaston Bachelard, Les Intuitions atomistiques (Essai de classification) (Paris: Boivin & Co, 1933). The book remains untranslated into English, which is surprising given Bachelard's continuing influence in fields as varied as art, literature, epistemology, and philosophical history.
3. Marx's Ph.D. thesis can be found in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works: Volume 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975) 25–107. Some of Nietzsche's notes on Democritus can be found in French in Friedrich Nietzsche: Sur Démocrite, trans. Philippe Ducat with a postface by Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: A.M. Métalié, 1990).
4. Here, we can also note that Deleuze, Negri, Serres, and Badiou, for all their differences, have each discussed, often at length, the contemporary importance of atomism.
5. Bachelard, Les Intuitions atomistiques 2. All translations from this text are my own.
6. Fr. 589, in G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969) 422. The second quote is attributed to Democritus by Galen. This is discussed in The Presocratic Philosophers 424.
7. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1998) 17.
8. The Philosophy of Poetry 74.
9. As Bergson puts it “The similarity between the ideas developed in Book V of his poem and those of Darwin has attracted attention more than once” (ibid. 62).
10. Ibid. 81.
11. Ibid. 23.
12. Ibid. 17. Alternatively, we can look to Serres for a mathematized reading of clinamen.
13. Ibid. 51.
14. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 2.60–61 (in the Loeb edition by W.H.D. Rouse, 98–99).
15. Les Intuitions atomistiques 12.
16. Ibid. 154.
17. Ibid. 23.
18. Creative Evolution 9.
19. Gaston Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester, UK: Clinamen, 2000) 23.
20. Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester, UK: Clinamen, 2002) 18.
21. Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984) 12.
22. The Formation of the Scientific Mind 248.
23. Creative Evolution 1.
24. The Dialectic of Duration 30.
25. Creative Evolution 144.
26. Ibid. 334.
27. The Philosophy of Poetry 15.
28. Creative Evolution 369.
29. Ibid. 269.
30. The Formation of the Scientific Mind 18.
31. The Dialectic of Duration 52.