Foreword

In this special issue of SubStance we celebrate the centennial of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution. Published in 1907, it has lost none of its relevance—in fact, as the content of this issue hopes to convey, it might well be that we are only now able to appreciate its far-reaching insights. After having set much of the agenda for twentieth-century philosophy (William James and American pragmatism, Ricoeur and history, Sartre and nothingness, Deleuze and differentiation, as well as engagements with Einstein, and of course the study of evolution), Bergson seemed to have exited the philosophical awareness around the late 1930s. If the great conferences on Bergson at his one hundredth birthday in 1959 were more akin to the form of extended obituaries, we can say that another 50 years down the line, Bergson appears to be alive and well.