Intuition of the Instant

Appearing in English for the first time, Intuition of the Instant—Bachelard’s first metaphysical meditation on time and its moral implications—was written in 1932 in the wake of Husserl’s lectures on streaming time-consciousness, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of the élan vital. A culmination of Bachelard’s earlier studies in scientific epistemology, this work builds the epistemic framework that would lead theorists of all stripes to advance knowledge by breaking...