Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard is a philosopher who investigates scientific thought and poetic imagination through distinct but complementary works. The Poetics of Space considers how houses, rooms, cellars, attics, drawers, nests, and corners become structures of memory and reverie; it is the most welcoming entrance to his poetics. The Psychoanalysis of Fire turns to an element charged with desire, fear, knowledge, and cultural fantasy. Air and Dreams An Essay on the Imagination of Movement follows material imagination into motion, height, and flight. The Dialectic of Duration challenges a continuous model of time through rhythm and interruption. Atomistic Intuitions An Essay on Classification belongs more directly to his reflection on scientific concepts. The Poetics of Space reveals the birth of an image; The Psychoanalysis of Fire broadens that method through matter, and The Dialectic of Duration opens the epistemological side of his thought.