Gaston Bachelard, Revised and Updated: Philosopher of Science and Imagination

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Gaston Bachelard, one of twentieth-century France's most original thinkers, is known by English-language readers primarily as the author of The Poetics of Space and several other books on the imagination, but he made significant contributions to the philosophy and history of science. In this book, the author provides a comprehensive introduction to Bachelard's work, demonstrating how his writings on the literary imagination can be better understood in the context of his exploration of how knowledge works in science. After an overview of Bachelard's writings on the scientific mind as it was transformed by relativity, quantum physics, and modern chemistry, the author examines Bachelard's works on the imagination in light of particular intellectual values Bachelard derived from science. His trajectory from science to a specifically literary imagination is traced by recognizing his concern with what science teaches about how we know, and his increasing preoccupation with questions of being when dealing with poetic imagery. The author also explores the material and dynamic imagination associated with the four elements - fire, water, air, and earth - and the phenomenology of creative imagination in Bachelard's Poetics of Space, his Poetics of Reverie, and the fragments of Poetics of Fire