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In his essay ‘The Possible and the Real’ (1930), the French philosopher Henri Bergson argued that perhaps the most foundational question of metaphysics – ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’ – is poorly conceived, reflecting a mistaken view that ‘there is less in the idea of void than in the idea of fullness’. Building from this starting point he suggests – to put it all a bit simply – a metaphysics sprung instead from the fullness of the evolving reality in which we ceaselessly find ourselves. This experimental video essay from Epoché Magazine pairs text excerpted from ‘The Possible and the Real’ with archival imagery and original music. Drawing out Bergson’s themes in unexpected ways, the short gives Bergson’s influential words a curious new life nearly a century after they were first published.
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
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Political philosophy
Beyond the veil – what rules would govern John Rawls’s ‘realistic Utopia’?
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Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
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Architecture
The celebrated architect who took inspiration from sitting, waiting and contemplating
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Rituals and celebrations
A beginner’s guide to a joyful Persian tradition of spring renewal and rebirth
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Metaphysics
Simple entities in universal harmony – Leibniz’s evocative perspective on reality
4 minutes