East Gallery, Buell Hall, Columbia University
Main campus entrance at Broadway and 116th st.

A roundtable with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Frédéric Worms, Mathias Girel, and Larry McGrath

2013 marks the centennial of a memorable visit by French philosopher Henri Bergson to Columbia University as a visiting professor and Columbia President Butler's personal guest. The Maison Française Centennial in 2013 is an opportunity for this panel of Bergson specialists to evoke the relationship between Bergsonism and American philosophy, pragmatism and William James in particular, and to examine the continuing influence of Bergson's major concepts, including temporality, life, difference, and novelty.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a Professor of French and Philosophy at Columbia, whose many publications include Bergson Postcolonial. Frédéric Worms is the Director of the International Center for the Study of Contemporary French Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy at University of Lille III, and the author of many books and editions on Bergson. Mathias Girel is Professor of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and a specialist of pragmatism. Larry McGrath is a PhD candidate at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation examines Bergson's 1913 trip to the U.S.