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⑨ some lines from Contingency & Representation ⑧, before Memory ⑩

⑨ some lines from Contingency & Representation ⑧, before Memory ⑩

In taking up some lines from ⑧, before ⑩, the current post assays brevity, as Dorothy Parker says the soul of lingerie, so is more in keeping with the format of a Digest as I describe it here, where there is an email link, which, just as I encourage you to subscribe
Simon Taylor 26 Feb 2026
⑧ Contingency & Representation: the coincidence of sign and still, brain and screen, image moving and moving image

⑧ Contingency & Representation: the coincidence of sign and still, brain and screen, image moving and moving image

—in- and finite, in- and animate; natural, artificial; living, mechanical, dead... The list goes on, but we have lost the sense, say since the publication of Frankenstein, of what is artificial and mechanical being also inanimate, dead. Rather than make a mystery of a living machine, a finite body, or
Simon Taylor 23 Feb 2026
⑩ Memory & Cinema

⑩ Memory & Cinema

After cinema what does memory do? This is the question I am trying to answer. By 'after cinema' I mean after its advent as a globally accessible technology, a globally successful technology, which spread out to all four corners of the world, since the world then had them,
Simon Taylor 16 Feb 2026
⑦ How Cinema Has Changed Our Minds

⑦ How Cinema Has Changed Our Minds

or, How Recording Moving Images Has Changed Our Minds Indirectly, I've heard a reader ask, Where's he heading with these philosophers he's talking about? and, because it's gratifying to be read, I am answering the question. The philosophers I have been writing
Simon Taylor 09 Dec 2025
⑥ indirect proof of the unity of the executive functions we associate with the subject, ego or self

⑥ indirect proof of the unity of the executive functions we associate with the subject, ego or self

I'm going to start with a long quote from Bergson but only pick out one or two threads to follow briefly: [from Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer's translation, Zone Books, NY, 1991. Online edition, at p.56, may differ.] This is to say that
Simon Taylor 25 Nov 2025
⓪ The proof of the infinity of attributes

⓪ The proof of the infinity of attributes

For Spinoza, God or Nature, Substance, has infinite attributes of which we have access only to two: thought and extension. If perceptions are outside, they are attributes of substance. Bergson solves Spinoza's problem. To put it like this, Bergson solves Spinoza's problem, is completely false: that
Simon Taylor 24 Nov 2025
⑤ virtual images

⑤ virtual images

The problem I have been dealing with is that of limiting virtual images to the body. Bergson's motor-diagramme seems to distinguish movements, the movements specifically across the surface of the brain of electrical impulses, to limn out the forms particular to . . . as I am doing now . . . the words
Simon Taylor 21 Nov 2025

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