----Henri Bergson is the author of numerous works including
Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution and Time and Free Will.
His work has been influential for many thinkers such as Walter
Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze.
----Drew Burk is a graduate and technical director at the European
Graduate School. He is the translator of such philosophers as
Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and Paul Virilio.
----What does laughter mean? What is the fundamental element of
the laughable? What common ground can be found between the
grimace of a clown, a play on words, a similar situation in a
burlesque and a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation
will invariably yield us the same essence from which so many
different products borrow either their obtrusive odor or their
delicate perfume? The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle on down,
have tackled this tiny problem, which has a knack of baffling every
effort, of slipping away, escaping only to pop up again, as a lively
challenge to philosophical speculation.
