title: Ontological argument

text: The italian journalist Thomas Emilio Villa argues that if we define God as an entity "than which no greater can be conceived", then still would be under a bigger idea, the ones of existence or non-existence. If God is God, must be a greater idea than the one of existence or non-existence. It is beyond it, otherwise the bigger idea is not "God" but the idea of "existence" itself. If God is God, then must be beyond the ideas of existence and non-existence. It must be a meta-existing being. Therefore the question whether God exist or do not exist is a non-sense: by definition, the idea of God must be beyond existence or its status would not the one of a proper God.


title: Ontological argument

text: Furthermore, if God is God, then it must be beyond logic, or its status would not be "a being than which no greater can be conceived", since Logic would be greater than God.


title: Ontological argument

text: By definition, God must be beyond Logic, and must be conceived only in a Meta-logical context beyond our logical and necessarily logical approach.


title: Ontological argument

text: Therefore, according to Villa, we cannot deal with the idea of God from our logical approach, and the idea itself of an existing or non existing God is a non-sense by definition.


title: Ontological argument

text: One of the earliest recorded objections to Anselm's argument was raised by one of Anselm's contemporaries, Gaunilo of Marmoutiers. He invited his reader to conceive an island "more excellent" than any other island. He suggested that, according to Anselm's proof, this island must necessarily exist, as an island that exists would be more excellent. Gaunilo's criticism does not explicitly demonstrate a flaw in Anselm's argument; rather, it argues that if Anselm's argument is sound, so are many other arguments of the same logical form, which cannot be accepted. He offered a further criticism of Anselm's ontological argument, suggesting that the notion of God cannot be conceived, as Anselm had asserted. He argued that many theists would accept that God, by nature, cannot be fully comprehended. Therefore, if humans cannot fully conceive of God, the ontological argument cannot work.


title: Ontological argument

text: Anselm responded to Gaunilo's criticism by arguing that the argument applied only to concepts with necessary existence. He suggested that only a being with necessary existence can fulfill the remit of "that than which nothing greater can be conceived". Furthermore, a contingent object, such as an island, could always be improved and thus could never reach a state of perfection. For that reason, Anselm dismissed any argument that did not relate to a being with necessary existence.


title: Ontological argument

text: Other parodies have been presented, including the devil corollary, the no devil corollary and the extreme no devil corollary. The devil corollary proposes that a being than which nothing worse can be conceived exists in the understanding (sometimes the term lesser is used in place of worse). Using Anselm's logical form, the parody argues that if it exists in the understanding, a worse being would be one that exists in reality; thus, such a being exists. The no devil corollary is similar, but argues that a worse being would be one that does not exist in reality, so does not exist. The extreme no devil corollary advances on this, proposing that a worse being would be that which does not exist in the understanding, so such a being exists neither in reality nor in the understanding. Timothy Chambers argued that the devil corollary is more powerful than Gaunilo's challenge because it withstands the challenges that may defeat Gaunilo's parody. He also claimed that the no devil corollary is a strong challenge, as it "underwrites" the no devil corollary, which "threatens Anselm's argument at its very foundations".


title: Ontological argument

text: Thomas Aquinas, while proposing five proofs of God's existence in his "Summa Theologica", objected to Anselm's argument. He suggested that people cannot know the nature of God and, therefore, cannot conceive of God in the way Anselm proposed. The ontological argument would be meaningful only to someone who understands the essence of God completely. Aquinas reasoned that, as only God can completely know His essence, only He could use the argument. His rejection of the ontological argument led other Catholic theologians to also reject the argument.


title: Ontological argument

text: Scottish philosopher and empiricist David Hume argued that nothing can be proven to exist using only "a priori" reasoning. In his "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion", the character Cleanthes proposes a criticism:


title: Ontological argument

text: Hume also suggested that, as we have no abstract idea of existence (apart from as part of our ideas of other objects), we cannot claim that the idea of God implies his existence. He suggested that any conception of God we may have, we can conceive either of existing or of not existing. He believed that existence is not a quality (or perfection), so a completely perfect being need not exist. Thus, he claimed that it is not a contradiction to deny God's existence. Although this criticism is directed against a cosmological argument, similar to that of Samuel Clarke in his first Boyle Lecture, it has been applied to ontological arguments as well.


title: Ontological argument

text: Immanuel Kant put forward an influential criticism of the ontological argument in his "Critique of Pure Reason". His criticism is primarily directed at Descartes, but also attacks Leibniz. It is shaped by his central distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. In an analytic proposition, the predicate concept is contained in its subject concept; in a synthetic proposition, the predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept.


title: Ontological argument

text: Kant questions the intelligibility of the concept of a necessary being. He considers examples of necessary propositions, such as "a triangle has three angles", and rejects the transfer of this logic to the existence of God. First, he argues that such necessary propositions are necessarily true only if such a being exists: "If" a triangle exists, it must have three angles. The necessary proposition, he argues, does not make the existence of a triangle necessary. Thus he argues that, if the proposition "X exists" is posited, it would follow that, "if" X exists, it exists necessarily; this does not mean that X exists in reality. Second, he argues that contradictions arise only when the predicate is rejected but the subject is maintained and, therefore, a judgement of non-existence cannot be a contradiction, as it denies the subject.


title: Ontological argument

text: Kant then proposes that the statement "God exists" must be analytic or synthetic—the predicate must be inside or outside of the subject, respectively. If the proposition is analytic, as the ontological argument takes it to be, then the statement would be true only because of the meaning given to the words. Kant claims that this is merely a tautology and cannot say anything about reality. However, if the statement is synthetic, the ontological argument does not work, as the existence of God is not contained within the definition of God (and, as such, evidence for God would need to be found).


title: Ontological argument

text: Kant goes on to write, "'being' is evidently not a real predicate" and cannot be part of the concept of something. He proposes that existence is not a predicate, or quality. This is because existence does not add to the essence of a being, but merely indicates its occurrence in reality. He states that by taking the subject of God with all its predicates and then asserting that God exists, "I add no new predicate to the conception of God". He argues that the ontological argument works only if existence is a predicate; if this is not so, he claims the ontological argument is invalidated, as it is then conceivable a completely perfect being doesn't exist.


title: Ontological argument

text: In addition, Kant claims that the concept of God is not one of a particular sense; rather, it is an "object of pure thought". He asserts that God exists outside the realm of experience and nature. Because we cannot experience God through experience, Kant argues that it is impossible to know how we would verify God's existence. This is in contrast to material concepts, which can be verified by means of the senses.


title: Ontological argument

text: Australian philosopher Douglas Gasking (1911–1994) developed a version of the ontological argument meant to prove God's non-existence. It was not intended to be serious; rather, its purpose was to illustrate the problems Gasking saw in the ontological argument.


title: Ontological argument

text: Gasking asserted that the creation of the world is the most marvellous achievement imaginable. The merit of such an achievement is the product of its quality and the creator's disability: the greater the disability of the creator, the more impressive the achievement. Non-existence, Gasking asserts, would be the greatest handicap. Therefore, if the universe is the product of an existent creator, we could conceive of a greater being—one which does not exist. A non-existent creator is greater than one which exists, so God does not exist. Gasking's proposition that the greatest disability would be non-existence is a response to Anselm's assumption that existence is a predicate and perfection. Gasking uses this logic to assume that non-existence must be a disability.


title: Ontological argument

text: Graham Oppy criticized the argument, viewing it as a weak parody of the ontological argument. He stated that, although it may be accepted that it would be a greater achievement for a non-existent creator to create something than a creator who exists, there is no reason to assume that a non-existent creator would be a greater being. He continued by arguing that there is no reason to view the creation of the world as "the most marvellous achievement imaginable". Finally, he stated that it may be inconceivable for a non-existent being to create anything at all.


title: Ontological argument

text: American philosopher of religion William L. Rowe notably believed that the structure of the ontological argument was such that it inherently begs the question of God's existence, that is to say, that one must have a presupposed belief in God's existence in order to accept the argument's conclusion. To illustrate this, Rowe devises the concept of a "unicornex," defined as a "unicorn that actually exists." Note that some possible object is a "unicorn", but since in fact "no unicorns exist", no possible object is a unicornex. Thus, in order to know that unicornexes are possible, you must know that unicornexes exist. Rowe believes that this is analogous to the ontological argument's conception of God in the formulation of the greatest conceivable being: the greatest conceivable being is an omnipotent, omnipowerful, supremely perfect, "existing" being. Nothing in that definition explicitly demonstrates existence, it is simply added on as a necessary philosophical quality in the same sense that the unicornex is given the quality of existence as well. Therefore, to Rowe, there is no way to know the existence of the greatest conceivable being without already knowing that he exists — the definition simply begs the question.


title: Ontological argument

text: In his development of the ontological argument, Leibniz attempted to demonstrate the coherence of a supremely perfect being. C. D. Broad countered that if two characteristics necessary for God's perfection are incompatible with a third, the notion of a supremely perfect being becomes incoherent. The ontological argument assumes the definition of God purported by classical theism: that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect. Kenneth Einar Himma claimed that omniscience and omnipotence may be incompatible: if God is omnipotent, then he should be able to create a being with free will; if he is omniscient, then he should know exactly what such a being will do (which may technically render them without free will). This analysis would render the ontological argument incoherent, as the characteristics required of a maximally great being cannot coexist in one being, thus such a being could not exist.


title: Ontological argument

text: Bertrand Russell, during his early Hegelian phase, accepted the argument; he once exclaimed: "Great God in Boots!—the ontological argument is sound!" However, he later criticized the argument, asserting that "the argument does not, to a modern mind, seem very convincing, but it is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies." He drew a distinction between existence and essence, arguing that the essence of a person can be described and their existence still remain in question.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Henri-Louis Bergson (; 18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a French philosopher who was influential in the tradition of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War, but also after 1966 when Gilles Deleuze published "Le Bergsonisme". Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.


title: Henri Bergson

text: He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented". In 1930 France awarded him its highest honour, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson's great popularity created a controversy in France where his views were seen as opposing the secular and scientific attitude adopted by the Republic's officials.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson lived the quiet life of a French professor, marked by the publication of his four principal works:


title: Henri Bergson

text: In 1900 the Collège de France selected Bergson to a Chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy, which he held until 1904. He then replaced Gabriel Tarde in the Chair of Modern Philosophy, which he held until 1920. The public attended his open courses in large numbers.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859. His father, the composer and pianist Michał Bergson, was of Polish-Jewish background (originally bearing the name Bereksohn). His great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry, especially those associated with the Hasidic movement. His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English-Jewish and Irish-Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław II Augustus,


title: Henri Bergson

text: Henri Bergson's family lived in London for a few years after his birth, and he obtained an early familiarity with the English language from his mother. Before he was nine, his parents settled in France, Henri becoming a naturalized French citizen.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, in 1891. (The novelist served as best man at Bergson's wedding.) Henri and Louise Bergson had a daughter, Jeanne, born deaf in 1896. Bergson's sister, Mina Bergson (also known as Moina Mathers), married the English occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the couple later relocated to Paris as well.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes (known as the Lycée Condorcet 1870–1874 and 1883–present) in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had previously received a Jewish religious education. Between 14 and 16, however, he lost his faith. According to Hude (1990), this moral crisis is tied to his discovery of the theory of evolution, according to which humanity shares common ancestry with modern primates, a process sometimes construed as not needing a creative deity.


title: Henri Bergson

text: While at the lycée, Bergson won a prize for his scientific work and another, in 1877 when he was eighteen, for the solution of a mathematical problem. His solution was published the following year in "Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques." It was his first published work. After some hesitation as to whether his career should lie in the sphere of the sciences or that of the humanities, he decided in favour of the latter, to the dismay of his teachers. When he was nineteen, he entered the École Normale Supérieure. During this period, he read Herbert Spencer. He obtained there the degree of "licence ès lettres", and this was followed by that of "agrégation de philosophie" in 1881 from the University of Paris.


title: Henri Bergson

text: The same year he received a teaching appointment at the lycée in Angers, the ancient capital of Anjou. Two years later he settled at the in Clermont-Ferrand, capital of the Puy-de-Dôme département.


title: Henri Bergson

text: The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand, Bergson displayed his ability in the humanities by the publication of an edition of extracts from Lucretius, with a critical study of De Rerum Natura, issued as Extraits de Lucrèce, and of the materialist cosmology of the poet (1884), repeated editions of which attest to its value in promoting Classics among French youth. While teaching and lecturing in this part of his country (the Auvergne region), Bergson found time for private study and original work. He crafted his dissertation "Time and Free Will", which was submitted, along with a short Latin thesis on Aristotle ("Quid Aristoteles de loco senserit", "On the Concept of Place in Aristotle") for his doctoral degree, which was awarded by the University of Paris in 1889. The work was published in the same year by Félix Alcan. He also gave courses in Clermont-Ferrand on the Pre-Socratics, in particular on Heraclitus.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson dedicated "Time and Free Will" to (1832–1918), then public education minister, a disciple of Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900) and the author of a philosophical work "On the Founding of Induction" ("Du fondement de l'induction", 1871). Lachelier endeavoured "to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatalism". (Bergson owed much to both of these teachers of the École Normale Supérieure. Compare his memorial address on Ravaisson, who died in 1900.) According to Louis de Broglie, "Time and Free Will" "antedates by forty years the ideas of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg on the physical interpretation of wave mechanics."


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson settled again in Paris in 1888, and after teaching for some months at the municipal college, known as the "College Rollin", he received an appointment at the Lycée Henri-Quatre, where he remained for eight years. There, he read Darwin, and gave a course on his theories. Although Bergson had previously endorsed Lamarckism and its theory of the heritability of acquired characteristics, he came to prefer Darwin's hypothesis of gradual variations, which were more compatible with his continual vision of life.


title: Henri Bergson

text: In 1896, he published his second major work, entitled "Matter and Memory". This rather difficult work investigates the function of the brain and undertakes an analysis of perception and memory, leading up to a careful consideration of the problems of the relation of body and mind. Bergson had spent years of research in preparation for each of his three large works. This is especially obvious in "Matter and Memory", where he showed a thorough acquaintance with the extensive pathological investigations which had been carried out during the period.


title: Henri Bergson

text: In 1898, Bergson became "maître de conférences" at his alma mater, École Normale Supérieure, and later in the same year received a promotion to a Professorship. The year 1900 saw him installed as Professor at the Collège de France, where he accepted the Chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy in succession to .


title: Henri Bergson

text: At the first International Congress of Philosophy, held in Paris during the first five days of August 1900, Bergson read a short, but important, paper, "Psychological Origins of the Belief in the Law of Causality" ("Sur les origines psychologiques de notre croyance à la loi de causalité"). In 1900, Felix Alcan published a work which had previously appeared in the "Revue de Paris", entitled "Laughter" ("Le rire"), one of the most important of Bergson's minor productions. This essay on the meaning of comedy stemmed from a lecture which he had given in his early days in the Auvergne. The study of it is essential to an understanding of Bergson's views of life, and its passages dealing with the place of the artistic in life are valuable. The main thesis of the work is that laughter is a corrective evolved to make social life possible for human beings. We laugh at people who fail to adapt to the demands of society if it seems their failure is akin to an inflexible mechanism. Comic authors have exploited this human tendency to laugh in various ways, and what is common to them is the idea that the comic consists in there being "something mechanical encrusted on the living".


title: Henri Bergson

text: In 1901, the Académie des sciences morales et politiques elected Bergson as a member, and he became a member of the institute. In 1903 he contributed to the "Revue de métaphysique et de morale" a very important essay entitled "Introduction to Metaphysics" ("Introduction à la metaphysique"), which is useful as a preface to the study of his three large books. He detailed in this essay his philosophical program, realized in the "Creative Evolution".


title: Henri Bergson

text: On the death of Gabriel Tarde, the sociologist and philosopher, in 1904, Bergson succeeded him in the Chair of Modern Philosophy. From 4 to 8 September of that year he visited Geneva, attending the Second International Congress of Philosophy, when he lectured on "The Mind and Thought: A Philosophical Illusion" (Le cerveau et la pensée: une illusion philosophique). An illness prevented his visiting Germany to attend the Third Congress held at Heidelberg. In these years, Bergson strongly influenced a young Jacques Maritain, perhaps even saving Maritain and his wife Raïssa from thoughts of suicide.


title: Henri Bergson

text: His third major work, "Creative Evolution", the most widely known and most discussed of his books, appeared in 1907. Pierre Imbart de la Tour remarked that "Creative Evolution" was a milestone of new direction in thought. By 1918, Alcan, the publisher, had issued twenty-one editions, making an average of two editions "per annum" for ten years. Following the appearance of this book, Bergson's popularity increased enormously, not only in academic circles but among the general reading public.


title: Henri Bergson

text: At that time, Bergson had already made an extensive study of biology including the theory of fecundation (as shown in the first chapter of the "Creative Evolution"), which had only recently emerged, ca. 1885 – no small feat for a philosopher specializing in the history of philosophy, in particular Greek and Roman philosophy. He also most certainly had read, apart from Darwin, Haeckel, from whom he retained his idea of a unity of life and of the ecological solidarity between all living beings, as well as Hugo de Vries, from whom he quoted his mutation theory of evolution (which he opposed, preferring Darwin's gradualism). He also quoted Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, the successor of Claude Bernard at the Chair of Experimental Medicine in the Collège de France, etc.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson served as a juror with Florence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal, a grant given between 1919 and 1954 to painters, sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers, and musicians.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson traveled to London in 1908 and met there with William James, the Harvard philosopher who was Bergson's senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. The two became great friends. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under date of 4 October 1908:


title: Henri Bergson

text: So modest and unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history of philosophy.


title: Henri Bergson

text: As early as 1880, James had contributed an article in French to the periodical "La Critique philosophique", of Renouvier and Pillon, entitled "Le Sentiment de l'Effort". Four years later, a couple of articles by him appeared in the journal "Mind": "What is an Emotion?" and "On some Omissions of Introspective Psychology". Bergson quoted the first two of these articles in his 1889 work, "Time and Free Will". In the following years, 1890–91 appeared the two volumes of James's monumental work, "The Principles of Psychology", in which he refers to a pathological phenomenon observed by Bergson. Some writers, taking merely these dates into consideration and overlooking the fact that James's investigations had been proceeding since 1870 (registered from time to time by various articles which culminated in "The Principles"), have mistakenly dated Bergson's ideas as earlier than James's.


title: Henri Bergson

text: I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and nothing that I have read for years has so excited and stimulated my thoughts. I am sure that his philosophy has a great future; it breaks through old frameworks and brings things to a solution from which new crystallizations can be reached.


title: Henri Bergson

text: The most noteworthy tributes James paid to Bergson come in the Hibbert Lectures (A Pluralistic Universe), which James gave at Manchester College, Oxford, shortly after meeting Bergson in London. He remarks on the encouragement he gained from Bergson's thought, and refers to his confidence in being "able to lean on Bergson's authority." (See further James's reservations about Bergson, below.)


title: Henri Bergson

text: The influence of Bergson had led James "to renounce the intellectualist method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be". It had induced him, he continued, "to give up logic, squarely and irrevocably" as a method, for he found that "reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it".


title: Henri Bergson

text: These remarks, which appeared in James's book "A Pluralistic Universe" in 1909, impelled many English and American readers to investigate Bergson's philosophy for themselves, but no English translations of Bergson's major work had yet appeared. James, however, encouraged and assisted Arthur Mitchell in preparing an English translation of "Creative Evolution". In August 1910, James died. It was his intention, had he lived to see the translation finished, to introduce it to the English reading public by a prefatory note of appreciation. In the following year, the translation was completed and still greater interest in Bergson and his work was the result. By coincidence, in that same year (1911), Bergson penned a preface of sixteen pages entitled "Truth and Reality" for the French translation of James's book, "Pragmatism". In it, he expressed sympathetic appreciation of James's work, together with certain important reservations.


title: Henri Bergson

text: From 5 to 11 April, Bergson attended the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy held at Bologna, in Italy, where he gave an address on "Philosophical Intuition". In response to invitations he visited England in May of that year, and on several subsequent occasions. These visits were well received. His speeches offered new Perspectives and elucidated many passages in his three major works: "Time and Free Will", "Matter and Memory", and "Creative Evolution". Although necessarily brief statements, they developed and enriched the ideas in his books and clarified for English audiences the fundamental principles of his philosophy.


title: Henri Bergson

text: In May 1911, Bergson gave two lectures entitled "The Perception of Change" ("La perception du changement") at the University of Oxford. The Clarendon Press published these in French in the same year.


title: Henri Bergson

text: His talks were concise and lucid, leading students and the general reader to his other, longer writings. Oxford later conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Science.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Two days later he delivered the Huxley Lecture at the University of Birmingham, taking for his subject "Life and Consciousness". This subsequently appeared in "The Hibbert Journal" (October 1911), and since revised, is the first essay in the collected volume "Mind-Energy" ("L'Énergie spirituelle"). In October he again traveled to England, where he had an enthusiastic reception, and delivered at University College London four lectures on "La Nature de l'Âme" [The nature of the soul].


title: Henri Bergson

text: In 1913, Bergson visited the United States of America at the invitation of Columbia University, New York, and lectured in several American cities, where very large audiences welcomed him. In February, at Columbia University, he lectured both in French and English, taking as his subjects: "Spirituality and Freedom" and "The Method of Philosophy". Being again in England in May of the same year, he accepted the Presidency of the British Society for Psychical Research, and delivered to the Society an address on "Phantoms of Life and Psychic Research" (Fantômes des vivants et recherche psychique).


title: Henri Bergson

text: Meanwhile, his popularity increased, and translations of his works began to appear in a number of languages: English, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, Polish, and Russian. In 1914 Bergson's fellow-countrymen honoured him by his election as a member of the Académie française. He was also made President of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, and in addition, he became Officier de la Légion d'honneur, and Officier de l'Instruction publique.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson found disciples of many types. In France movements such as neo-Catholicism and Modernism on the one hand and syndicalism on the other endeavoured to absorb and appropriate for their own ends some central ideas of his teaching. The continental organ of socialist and syndicalist theory, "Le Mouvement socialiste",


title: Henri Bergson

text: portrayed the realism of Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as hostile to all forms of intellectualism, and argued, therefore, that supporters of Marxist socialism should welcome a philosophy such as that of Bergson. Other writers, in their eagerness, claimed that the thought of the holder of the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France, and the aims of the "Confédération Générale du Travail" and the Industrial Workers of the World were in essential agreement.


title: Henri Bergson

text: While social revolutionaries endeavoured to make the most out of Bergson, many religious leaders, particularly the more liberal-minded theologians of all creeds, e.g., the Modernists and Neo-Catholic Party in his own country, showed a keen interest in his writings, and many of them found encouragement and stimulus in his work. The Roman Catholic Church, however, banned Bergson's three books on the charge of pantheism (that is, of conceiving of God as immanent to his Creation and of being himself created in the process of the Creation). They were placed on the Index of prohibited books (Decree of 1 June 1914).


title: Henri Bergson

text: In 1914, the Scottish universities arranged for Bergson to give the famous Gifford Lectures, planning one course for the spring and another for the autumn. Bergson delivered the first course, consisting of eleven lectures, under the title of "The Problem of Personality", at the University of Edinburgh in the spring of that year. The course of lectures planned for the autumn months had to be abandoned because of the outbreak of war.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson was not, however, silent during the conflict, and he gave some inspiring addresses. As early as 4 November 1914, he wrote an article entitled "Wearing and Nonwearing forces" (La force qui s'use et celle qui ne s'use pas), which appeared in a periodical of the "poilus", "Le Bulletin des Armées de la République Française". A presidential address, "The Meaning of the War", was delivered in December 1914, to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson contributed also to the publication arranged by "The Daily Telegraph" in honour of King Albert I of the Belgians, "King Albert's Book" (Christmas, 1914).


title: Henri Bergson

text: In 1915, he was succeeded in the office of President of the "Académie des Sciences morales et politiques" by Alexandre Ribot, and then delivered a discourse on "The Evolution of German Imperialism". Meanwhile, he found time to issue at the request of the Minister of Public Instruction a brief summary of French Philosophy. Bergson did a large amount of traveling and lecturing in America during the war. He participated in the negotiations which led to the entry of the United States in the war. He was there when the French Mission under René Viviani paid a visit in April and May 1917, following upon America's entry into the conflict. Viviani's book "La Mission française en Amérique" (1917), contains a preface by Bergson.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Early in 1918, the "Académie française" received Bergson officially when he took his seat among "The Select Forty" as successor to Emile Ollivier (the author of the historical work "L'Empire libéral"). A session was held in January in his honour at which he delivered an address on Ollivier. In the war, Bergson saw the conflict of Mind and Matter, or rather of Life and Mechanism; and thus he shows us the central idea of his own philosophy in action. To no other philosopher has it fallen, during his lifetime, to have his philosophical principles so vividly and so terribly tested.[citation?]


title: Henri Bergson

text: As many of Bergson's contributions to French periodicals remained relatively inaccessible, he had them published in two volumes. The first of these was being planned when war broke out. The conclusion of strife was marked by the appearance of a delayed volume in 1919. It bears the title "Spiritual Energy: Essays and Lectures" (reprinted as "Mind-Energy" – "L'Énergie spirituelle: essais et conférences"). The advocate of Bergson's philosophy in England, Wildon Carr, prepared an English translation under the title "Mind-Energy". The volume opens with the Huxley Memorial Lecture of 1911, "Life and Consciousness", in a revised and developed form under the title "Consciousness and Life". Signs of Bergson's growing interest in social ethics and in the idea of a future life of personal survival are manifested. The lecture before the Society for Psychical Research is included, as is also the one given in France, "L'Âme et le Corps", which contains the substance of the four London lectures on the Soul. The seventh and last article is a reprint of Bergson's famous lecture to the Congress of Philosophy at Geneva in 1904, "The Psycho-Physiological Paralogism" (Le paralogisme psycho-physiologique), which now appears as "Le cerveau et la pensée: une illusion philosophique". Other articles are on the False Recognition, on Dreams, and Intellectual Effort. The volume is a most welcome production and serves to bring together what Bergson wrote on the concept of mental force, and on his view of "tension" and "detension" as applied to the relation of matter and mind.


title: Henri Bergson

text: In June 1920, the University of Cambridge honoured him with the degree of Doctor of Letters. In order that he might devote his full-time to the great new work he was preparing on ethics, religion, and sociology, the Collège de France relieved Bergson of the duties attached to the Chair of Modern Philosophy there. He retained the chair, but no longer delivered lectures, his place being taken by his disciple, the mathematician and philosopher Édouard Le Roy, who supported a conventionalist stance on the foundations of mathematics, which was adopted by Bergson. Le Roy, who also succeeded to Bergson at the "Académie française" and was a fervent Catholic, extended to revealed truth his conventionalism, leading him to privilege faith, heart and sentiment to dogmas, speculative theology and abstract reasoning. Like Bergson's, his writings were placed on the Index by the Vatican.


title: Henri Bergson

text: In 1922, Bergson's book "Durée et simultanéité, a propos de la theorie d'Einstein" ("Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe") was published. Earlier that year, Albert Einstein had come to the French Society of Philosophy and briefly replied to a short speech made by Bergson. It has been alleged that Bergson's knowledge of physics was insufficient and that the book did not follow up contemporary developments on physics. On the contrary, in "Einstein and the Crisis of Reason", a leading French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, accused Einstein of failing to grasp Bergson's argument. This argument, Merleau-Ponty says, which concerns not the physics of special relativity but its philosophical foundations, addresses paradoxes caused by popular interpretations and misconceptions about the theory, including Einstein's own. "Duration and simultaneity" was not published in the 1951 "Edition du Centenaire" in French, which contained all of his other works, and was only published later in a work gathering different essays, titled "Mélanges". This work took advantage of Bergson's experience at the League of Nations, where he presided from 1920 to 1925 over the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (the ancestor of UNESCO, and which included Einstein, Marie Curie, etc.).


title: Henri Bergson

text: While living with his wife and daughter in a modest house in a quiet street near the Porte d'Auteuil in Paris, Bergson won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927 for having written "The Creative Evolution". Because of serious rheumatics ailments, he could not travel to Stockholm, and sent instead a text subsequently published in "La Pensée et le mouvant". He was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1928.


title: Henri Bergson

text: After his retirement from the Collège de France, Bergson began to fade into obscurity: he suffered from a degenerative illness (rheumatism, which left him half paralyzed). He completed his new work, "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion", which extended his philosophical theories to the realms of morality, religion, and art, in 1932. It was respectfully received by the public and the philosophical community, but all by that time realized that Bergson's days as a philosophical luminary were past. He was, however, able to reiterate his core beliefs near the end of his life, by renouncing all of the posts and honours previously awarded him, rather than accept exemption from the antisemitic laws imposed by the Vichy government.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson inclined to convert to Catholicism, writing in his will on 7 February 1937: "My thinking has always brought me nearer to Catholicism, in which I saw the perfect complement to Judaism." Though wishing to convert to Catholicism, as stated in his will, he did not convert in view of the travails inflicted on the Jewish people by the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1930s; he did not want to appear to want to leave the persecuted. After the fall of France in 1940, Jews in occupied France were required to register at police stations. When completing his police form, Bergson made the following entry: "Academic. Philosopher. Nobel Prize winner. Jew." It was the position of the Archbishop of Paris, Emmanuel Célestin Suhard, that the public revelation of Bergson's conversion was too dangerous at the time, when the city was occupied by the Nazis, to both the Church and the Jewish population.


title: Henri Bergson

text: On 3 January 1941, Bergson died in occupied Paris from bronchitis. A Roman Catholic priest said prayers at his funeral per his request. Bergson is buried in the Cimetière de Garches, Hauts-de-Seine.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson rejected what he saw as the overly mechanistic predominant view of causality (as expressed in reductionism). He argued that we must allow space for free will to unfold in an autonomous and unpredictable fashion. While Kant saw free will as something beyond time and space and therefore ultimately a matter of faith, Bergson attempted to redefine the modern conceptions of time, space, and causality in his concept of Duration, making room for a tangible marriage of free will with causality. Seeing Duration as a mobile and fluid concept, Bergson argued that one cannot understand Duration through "immobile" analysis, but only through experiential, first-person intuition.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces. His philosophy emphasizes pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterize his system as a process philosophy. It touches upon such topics as time and identity, free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the foundation of mathematics and the limits of reason.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Criticizing Kant's theory of knowledge exposed in the "Critique of Pure Reason" and his conception of truth – which he compares to Plato's conception of truth as its symmetrical inversion (order of nature/order of thought) – Bergson attempted to redefine the relations between science and metaphysics, intelligence and intuition, and insisted on the necessity of increasing thought's possibility through the use of intuition, which, according to him, alone approached a knowledge of the absolute and of real life, understood as pure duration. Because of his (relative) criticism of intelligence, he makes a frequent use of images and metaphors in his writings in order to avoid the use of concepts, which (he considers) fail to touch the whole of reality, being only a sort of abstract net thrown on things. For instance, he says in "The Creative Evolution" (chap. III) that thought in itself would never have thought it possible for the human being to swim, as it cannot deduce swimming from walking. For swimming to be possible, man must throw itself in water, and only then can thought consider swimming as possible. Intelligence, for Bergson, is a practical faculty rather than a pure speculative faculty, a product of evolution used by man to survive. If metaphysics is to avoid "false problems", it should not extend the abstract concepts of intelligence to pure speculation, but rather use intuition.


title: Henri Bergson

text: "The Creative Evolution" in particular attempted to think through the continuous creation of life, and explicitly pitted itself against Herbert Spencer's evolutionary philosophy. Spencer had attempted to transpose Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in philosophy and to construct a cosmology based on this theory (Spencer also coined the expression "survival of the fittest"). Bergson disputed what he saw as Spencer's mechanistic philosophy.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson's "Lebensphilosophie" (philosophy of life) can be seen as a response to the mechanistic philosophies of his time, but also to the failure of finalism. Indeed, he considers that finalism is unable to explain "duration" and the "continuous creation of life", as it only explains life as the progressive development of an initially determined program – a notion which remains, for example, in the expression of a "genetic program"; such a description of finalism was adopted, for instance, by Leibniz.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Bergson regarded planning beforehand for the future as impossible, since time itself unravels unforeseen possibilities. Indeed, one could always explain a historical event retrospectively by its conditions of possibility. But, in the introduction to the "Pensée et le mouvant", he explains that such an event created retrospectively its causes, taking the example of the creation of a work of art, for example a symphony: it was impossible to predict what would be the symphony of the future, as if the musician knew what symphony would be the best for his time, he would realize it. In his words, the effect created its cause. Henceforth, he attempted to find a third way between mechanism and finalism, through the notion of an original impulse, the "élan vital", in life, which dispersed itself through evolution into contradictory tendencies (he substituted to the finalist notion of a teleological aim a notion of an original impulse).


title: Henri Bergson

text: The foundation of Henri Bergson's philosophy, his theory of Duration, he discovered when trying to improve the inadequacies of Herbert Spencer's philosophy. Bergson introduced Duration as a theory of time and consciousness in his doctoral thesis "Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness" as a response to another of his influences: Immanuel Kant.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Kant believed that free will (better perceived as The Will) could only exist outside of time and space, indeed the only non-determined aspect of our private existence in the universe, separate to water cycles, mathematics and mortality. However, we could therefore not know whether or not it exists, and that it is nothing but a pragmatic faith. Bergson responded that Kant, along with many other philosophers, had confused time with its spatial representation. In reality, Bergson argued, Duration is unextended yet heterogeneous, and so its parts cannot be juxtaposed as a succession of distinct parts, with one causing the other. Based on this he concluded that determinism is an impossibility and free will pure mobility, which is what Bergson identified as being the Duration. For Bergson, reality is composed of change.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Duration, as defined by Bergson, then is a unity and a multiplicity, but, being mobile, it cannot be grasped through immobile concepts. Bergson hence argues that one can grasp it only through his method of intuition. Two images from Henri Bergson's "An Introduction to Metaphysics" may help one to grasp Bergson's term intuition, the limits of concepts, and the ability of intuition to grasp the absolute. The first image is that of a city. Analysis, or the creation of concepts through the divisions of points of view, can only ever give us a model of the city through a construction of photographs taken from every possible point of view, yet it can never give us the dimensional value of walking in the city itself. One can only grasp this through intuition; likewise the experience of reading a line of Homer. One may translate the line and pile commentary upon commentary, but this commentary too shall never grasp the simple dimensional value of experiencing the poem in its originality itself. The method of intuition, then, is that of getting back to the things themselves.


title: Henri Bergson

text: "Élan vital" ranks as Bergson's third essential concept, after Duration and intuition. An idea with the goal of explaining evolution, the "élan vital" first appeared in 1907's "Creative Evolution". Bergson portrays "élan vital" as a kind of vital impetus which explains evolution in a less mechanical and more lively manner, as well as accounting for the creative impulse of mankind. This concept led several authors to characterize Bergson as a supporter of vitalism—although he criticized it explicitly in "The Creative Evolution", as he thought, against Driesch and Johannes Reinke (whom he cited) that there is neither "purely internal finality nor clearly cut individuality in nature":


title: Henri Bergson

text: Hereby lies the stumbling block of vitalist theories ... It is thus in vain that one pretends to reduce finality to the individuality of the living being. If there is finality in the world of life, it encompasses the whole of life in one indivisible embrace.


title: Henri Bergson

text: In "", Bergson develops a theory not of laughter itself but of how laughter can be provoked (see his objection to Delage, published in the 23rd edition of the essay). He describes the process of laughter (refusing to give a conceptual definition which would not approach its reality), used in particular by comics and clowns, as caricature of the mechanistic nature of humans (habits, automatic acts, etc.), one of the two tendencies of life (degradation towards inert matter and mechanism, and continual creation of new forms). However, Bergson warns us that laughter's criterion of what should be laughed at is not a moral criterion and that it can in fact cause serious damage to a person's self-esteem. This essay made his opposition to the Cartesian theory of the animal-machine obvious.


title: Henri Bergson

text: From his first publications, Bergson's philosophy attracted strong criticism from different quarters, although he also became very popular and durably influenced French philosophy. The mathematician Édouard Le Roy became Bergson's main disciple. Nonetheless, Suzanne Guerlac has argued that his institutional position at the Collège de France, delivering lectures to a general audience, may have retarded the systematic reception of his thought: "Bergson achieved enormous popular success in this context, often due to the emotional appeal of his ideas. But he did not have the equivalent of graduate students who might have become rigorous interpreters of his thought. Thus Bergson's philosophy—in principle open and nonsystematic—was easily borrowed piecemeal and altered by enthusiastic admirers".


title: Henri Bergson

text: Alfred North Whitehead acknowledged Bergson's influence on his process philosophy in his 1929 "Process and Reality." However, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead's collaborator on "Principia Mathematica", was not so entranced by Bergson's philosophy. Although acknowledging Bergson's literary skills, Russell saw Bergson's arguments at best as persuasive or emotive speculation but not at all as any worthwhile example of sound reasoning or philosophical insight. The epistemologist Gaston Bachelard explicitly alluded to him in the last pages of his 1938 book "The Formation of the Scientific Mind". Others influenced by Bergson include Vladimir Jankélévitch, who wrote a book on him in 1931, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Gilles Deleuze who wrote "Le bergsonisme" in 1966. The Greek philosopher Helle Lambridis developed an interest in Bergson early in her career, and after two publications in 1929 - a book that introduced Bergson's work to the Greek audience and a translation into Greek of Bergson's book "L'Énergie spirituelle" (1919) - the second part of her "Introduction to Philosophy" I & II (1965) included his philosophical work on the concept of 'time', although this part (II) was not published until 2004. Bergson also influenced the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, although Merleau-Ponty had reservations about Bergson's philosophy. The Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis studied under Bergson in Paris and his writing and philosophy were profoundly influenced as a result.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Many writers of the early 20th century criticized Bergson's intuitionism, indeterminism, psychologism and interpretation of the scientific impulse. Those who explicitly criticized Bergson, either in published articles or in letters, included Bertrand Russell George Santayana, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Julien Benda, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Wallace Stevens (though Stevens also praised him in his work "The Necessary Angel"), Paul Valéry, André Gide, Jean Piaget, Marxist philosophers Theodor W. Adorno, Lucio Colletti, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Georges Politzer, as well as Maurice Blanchot, American philosophers such as Irving Babbitt, Arthur Lovejoy, Josiah Royce, The New Realists (Ralph B. Perry, E. B. Holt, and William Pepperell Montague), The Critical Realists (Durant Drake, Roy W. Sellars, C. A. Strong, and A. K. Rogers), Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Roger Fry (see his letters), Julian Huxley (in "") and Virginia Woolf (for the latter, see Ann Banfield, "The Phantom Table").


title: Henri Bergson

text: The Vatican accused Bergson of pantheism, while others have characterized his philosophy as a materialist emergentism – Samuel Alexander and C. Lloyd Morgan explicitly claimed Bergson as their forebear. According to Henri Hude (1990, II, p. 142), who supports himself on the whole of Bergson's works as well as his now published courses, accusing him of pantheism is a "counter-sense". Hude alleges that a mystical experience, roughly outlined at the end of "Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion", is the inner principle of his whole philosophy, although this has been contested by other commentators.


title: Henri Bergson

text: Charles Sanders Peirce took strong exception to those who associated him with Bergson. In response to a letter comparing their work, Peirce wrote, "a man who seeks to further science can hardly commit a greater sin than to use the terms of his science without anxious care to use them with strict accuracy; it is not very gratifying to my feelings to be classed along with a Bergson who seems to be doing his utmost to muddle all distinctions." Peirce also comments on Bergson in respect to a proposed book on his semiotics (which he never wrote) saying: "I feel confident the book would make a serious impression much deeper and surer than Bergson’s, which I find quite too vague." Gilles Deleuze, however, saw much in common between Bergson's philosophy and that of Peirce - exploring the many connections between them in "" and "". As the Deleuze scholar David Deamer writes: Deleuze sets about "aligning Bergson’s sensory-motor schema [from "Matter and Memory"] with the semiosis of Charles Sanders Peirce from "Pragmatism and Pragmaticism" (1903). William James's students resisted the assimilation of his work to that of Bergson. See, for example, Horace Kallen's book on the subject "James and Bergson". As Jean Wahl described the "ultimate disagreement" between James and Bergson in his "System of Metaphysics": "for James, the consideration of action is necessary for the definition of truth, according to Bergson, action ... must be kept from our mind if we want to see the truth". Gide even went so far as to say that future historians will overestimate Bergson's influence on art and philosophy just because he was the self-appointed spokesman for "the spirit of the age".


title: Henri Bergson

text: As early as the 1890s, Santayana attacked certain key concepts in Bergson's philosophy, above all his view of the New and the indeterminate:


title: Henri Bergson

text: the possibility of a new and unaccountable fact appearing at any time," he writes in his book on Hermann Lotze, "does not practically affect the method of investigation; ... the only thing given up is the hope that these hypotheses may ever be adequate to the reality and cover the process of nature without leaving a remainder. This is no great renunciation; for that consummation of science ... is by no one really expected.


title: Henri Bergson

text: According to Santayana and Russell, Bergson projected false claims onto the aspirations of scientific method, claims which Bergson needed to make in order to justify his prior moral commitment to freedom. Russell takes particular exception to Bergson's understanding of number in chapter two of "Time and Free-will". According to Russell, Bergson uses an outmoded spatial metaphor ("extended images") to describe the nature of mathematics as well as logic in general. "Bergson only succeeds in making his theory of number possible by confusing a particular collection with the number of its terms, and this again with number in general", writes Russell (see "The Philosophy of Bergson" and "A History of Western Philosophy").


title: Henri Bergson

text: Suzanne Guerlac has argued that the more recent resurgence of scholarly interest in Bergson is related to the growing influence of his follower Deleuze within continental philosophy: "If there is a return to Bergson today, then, it is largely due to Gilles Deleuze whose own work has etched the contours of the New Bergson. This is not only because Deleuze wrote about Bergson; it is also because Deleuze's own thought is deeply engaged with that of his predecessor, even when Bergson is not explicitly mentioned." Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard agree with Guerlac that "the recent revitalization of Bergsonism ... is almost entirely due to Deleuze." They explain that Bergson's concept of multiplicity "is at the very heart of Deleuze's thought, and duration is the model for all of Deleuze's 'becomings.' The other aspect that attracted Deleuze, which is indeed connected to the first, is Bergson's criticism of the concept of negation in "Creative Evolution" ... Thus Bergson became a resource in the criticism of the Hegelian dialectic, the negative." It is this aspect that Mark Sinclair focuses upon in "Bergson" (2020). He writes that despite the philosopher and his philosophy being very popular during the early years of the twentieth century, his ideas had been critiqued and then rejected first by phenomenology, then by existentialism, and finally by post-structuralism. As Sinclair goes on to explain, over series of publications including "Bergsonism" (1966) and "Difference and Repetition" (1968), Deleuze championed Bergson as a thinker of "difference that proceeds any sense of negation" In this way, "Deleuze’s interpretation served to keep the flame of Bergson’s philosophy alive and it has been a key motivation for the renewed scholarly attention to it."


title: Henri Bergson

text: Ilya Prigogine acknowledged Bergson's influence at his Nobel Prize reception lecture: "Since my adolescence, I have read many philosophical texts, and I still remember the spell "L’évolution créatrice" cast on me. More specifically, I felt that some essential message was embedded, still to be made explicit, in Bergson‘s remark: 'The more deeply we study the nature of time, the better we understand that duration means invention, creation of forms, continuous elaboration of the absolutely new.'"


title: Henri Bergson

text: Japanese philosopher Yasushi Hirai from Fukuoka University has led a collaborative and interdisciplinary project from 2007, bringing together Eastern and Western philosophers and scientists to discuss and promote Bergson's work. This has influenced the development of specific artificial neural networks which incorporate features inspired by Bergson's philosophy of memory.


title: Henri Bergson

text: In The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist extensively cites Bergson. "‘Bergson arrived’, according to philosopher Peter Gunter, ‘at insights closely resembling those of quantum physics.’ Only Bergson got there first."


title: Henri Bergson

text: Several Hindu authors have found parallels to Hindu philosophy in Bergson's thought. The integrative evolutionism of Sri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher from the early 20th century, has many similarities to Bergson's philosophy. Whether this represents a direct influence of Bergson is disputed, although Aurobindo was familiar with many Western philosophers. K Narayanaswami Aiyer, a member of the Theosophical Society, published a pamphlet titled "Professor Bergson and the Hindu Vedanta", where he argued that Bergson's ideas on matter, consciousness, and evolution were in agreement with Vedantic and Puranic explanations. Nalini Kanta Brahma, Marie Tudor Garland and Hope Fitz are other authors who have comparatively evaluated Hindu and Bergsonian philosophies, especially in relation to intuition, consciousness and evolution.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: Ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA), also known as poly (ethylene-vinyl acetate) (PEVA), is the copolymer of ethylene and vinyl acetate. The weight percent of vinyl acetate usually varies from 10 to 40%, with the remainder being ethylene. There are three different types of EVA copolymer, which differ in the vinyl acetate (VA) content and the way the materials are used.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: The EVA copolymer which is based on a low proportion of VA (approximately up to 4%) may be referred to as vinyl acetate modified polyethylene. It is a copolymer and is processed as a thermoplastic material – just like low density polyethylene. It has some of the properties of a low density polyethylene but increased gloss (useful for film), softness and flexibility. The material is generally considered non-toxic.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: The EVA copolymer, which is based on a medium proportion of VA (approximately 4 to 30%), is referred to as thermoplastic ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer and is a thermoplastic elastomer material. It is not vulcanized but has some of the properties of a rubber or of plasticized polyvinyl chloride particularly at the higher end of the range. Both filled and unfilled EVA materials have good low temperature properties and are tough. The materials with approximately 11% VA are used as hot melt adhesives.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: The EVA copolymer which is based on a high proportion of VA (greater than 60%) is referred to as ethylene-vinyl acetate rubber.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: EVA is an elastomeric polymer that produces materials which are "rubber-like" in softness and flexibility. The material has good clarity and gloss, low-temperature toughness, stress-crack resistance, hot-melt adhesive waterproof properties, and resistance to UV radiation. EVA has a distinctive vinegar-like odor and is competitive with rubber and vinyl polymer products in many electrical applications.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: Hot melt adhesives (such as hot glue sticks) and top-of-the-line soccer cleats are usually made from EVA, generally with additives like wax and resin. EVA is also used as a clinginess-enhancing additive in plastic wraps. Craft-foam sheets are made of EVA and are popularly used for children's foam stickers.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: EVA is also used in biomedical engineering applications as a drug-delivery device. The polymer is dissolved in an organic solvent (such as dichloromethane). Powdered drug and filler (typically an inert sugar) are added to the liquid solution and rapidly mixed to obtain a homogeneous mixture. The drug-filler-polymer mixture is then cast into a mold at −80 °C and freeze-dried until solid. These devices are used in drug delivery research to slowly release a compound. The polymer does not biodegrade within the body, but is quite inert and causes little or no reaction following implantation.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: EVA is one of the materials popularly known as "expanded rubber" or "foam rubber". EVA foam is used as padding in equipment for various sports such as ski boots, bicycle saddles, hockey pads, boxing and mixed-martial-arts gloves and helmets, wakeboard boots, waterski boots, fishing rods and fishing-reel handles. It is typically used as a shock absorber in sports shoes, for example. (Some manufacturers of running shoes, such as Nike, market EVA-based compression-moulded foam used in the manufacture of running shoes as "Phylon".)


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: It is used for the manufacture of floats for commercial fishing gear such as purse seine (seine fishing) and gillnets. In addition, because of its buoyancy, EVA has made its way into non-traditional products such as floating eyewear. It is also used in the photovoltaics industry as an encapsulation material for crystalline silicon solar cells in the manufacture of photovoltaic modules. EVA slippers and sandals are popular, being lightweight, easy to form, odourless, glossy, and cheaper compared to natural rubber. In fishing rods, EVA is used to construct handles on the rod-butt end. EVA can be used as a substitute for cork in many applications.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: EVA copolymers are adhesives used in packaging, textile, bookbinding for bonding plastic films, metal surfaces, coated paper and as redispersible powders in plasters and cement renders.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: In recent years, EVA foam has seen popular use in cosplay communities, largely in part due to its ease to work with, durability, and comfort in comparison to traditional plastic-based costumes.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: Flower-making foam is a thin sheet made of EVA, which is flexible, and is used by artists and craft makers to make artificial flowers. These foams are presented as raw sheets and they can be cut into the desired petal shape and then can be formed by ironing to assemble artificial flowers by putting these petals together.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: EVA is also used in coatings formulation of good-quality interior water-borne paints at 53% primary dispersant.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: EVA is used in orthotics, surfboard and skimboard traction pads, car mats and for the manufacturing of some artificial flowers. It is used as a cold flow improver for diesel fuel and as a separator in HEPA filters. EVA can easily be cut from sheets and molded to shape. It is also used to make thermoplastic mouthguards that soften in boiling water for a user-specific fit. It is also used for conditioning and waterproofing leather.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: EVA finds application in the making of nicotine transdermal patches, since the copolymer binds well with other agents to form gel-like substances.


title: Ethylene-vinyl acetate

text: Polyethylene vinyl acetate has recently become a popular alternative to polyvinyl chloride because it does not contain chlorine. As of 2014, EVA has not been found to be carcinogenic by the NTP, ACGIH, IARC or OSHA, and has no known adverse effect on human health. Like many plastics, it is difficult to biodegrade. One study suggested it may have adverse effects on living organisms, but its effect on humans has not been determined.


title: ANFO

text: ANFO ( ) (or AN/FO, for ammonium nitrate/fuel oil) is a widely used bulk industrial explosive. It consists of 94% porous prilled ammonium nitrate (NHNO) (AN), which acts as the oxidizing agent and absorbent for the fuel, and 6% number 2 fuel oil (FO). The use of ANFO originated in the 1950s.


title: ANFO

text: ANFO accounts for an estimated 90% of the of explosives used annually in North America. It has found wide use in coal mining, quarrying, metal mining, and civil construction in applications where its low cost and ease of use may outweigh the benefits of other explosives, such as water resistance, oxygen balance, higher detonation velocity, or performance in small-diameter columns. ANFO is also widely used in avalanche hazard mitigation.


title: ANFO

text: The chemistry of ANFO detonation is the reaction of ammonium nitrate with a long-chain alkane (CH) to form nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water. In an ideal stoichiometrically balanced reaction, ANFO is composed of about 94.5% AN and 5.5% FO by weight. In practice, a slight excess of fuel oil is added, as underdosing results in reduced performance while overdosing merely results in more post-blast fumes. When detonation conditions are optimal, the aforementioned gases are the only products. In practical use, such conditions are impossible to attain, and blasts produce moderate amounts of toxic gases such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides (NO).


title: ANFO

text: The fuel component of ANFO is typically diesel, but kerosene, coal dust, racing fuel, or even molasses have been used instead. Finely powdered aluminium in the mixture will sensitise it to detonate more readily.


title: ANFO

text: ANFO is highly insensitive, making it a tertiary explosive (or a "blasting agent"). Without a sensitizer, it cannot be detonated by a typical (such as No. 8) blasting cap with the small amount of primary explosives within. A larger quantity of secondary explosive, known as a primer or a booster, must be used. One or two sticks of dynamite were historically used; current practice is to use Tovex or cast boosters of pentolite (TNT/PETN or similar compositions).


title: ANFO

text: ANFO is technically a high explosive in that it decomposes through detonation rather than deflagration at a velocity higher than the speed of sound in the material, but the low sensitivity means that it is not generally regulated as such. ANFO has a moderate velocity compared to other industrial explosives, measuring 3,200 m/s in diameter, unconfined, at ambient temperature. It is described as a "non-ideal high explosive", as its explosive velocity is far from the thermodynamic ideal due to its porosity and the phase separation of its two components.


title: ANFO

text: In the mining industry, the term ANFO specifically describes a mixture of solid ammonium nitrate prills and diesel fuel. Other explosives based on the ANFO chemistry exist; the most commonly used are emulsions. They differ from ANFO in the physical form the reactants take. The most notable properties of emulsions are water resistance and higher bulk density.


title: ANFO

text: While the density of pure crystalline ammonium nitrate is 1700 kg/m, individual prills of explosive-grade AN measure approximately 1300 kg/m. Their lower density is due to the presence of a small spherical air pocket within each prill: this is the primary difference between AN sold for blasting and that sold for agricultural use. These voids are necessary to sensitize ANFO: they create so-called "hot spots". Finely powdered aluminium can be added to ANFO to increase both sensitivity and energy; in commercial usages however, this has fallen out of favor due to cost.


title: ANFO

text: ANFO has a bulk density of about 840 kg/m. In surface mining applications, it is typically loaded into boreholes by dedicated trucks that mix the AN and FO components immediately before the product is dispensed. In underground mining applications, ANFO is typically blow-loaded.


title: ANFO

text: AN is highly hygroscopic, readily absorbing water from air. In humid environments, absorbed water interferes with its explosive function. AN is fully water-soluble; as such, it cannot be loaded into boreholes that contain standing water. When used in wet mining conditions, considerable effort must be taken to remove standing water and install a liner in the borehole; it is generally more productive to instead use a water-resistant explosive such as emulsion.


title: ANFO

text: In most jurisdictions, ammonium nitrate need not be classified as an explosive for transport purposes; it is merely an oxidizer. Mines typically prepare ANFO on-site using the same diesel fuel that powers their vehicles. While many fuels can theoretically be used, the low volatility and cost of diesel make it ideal.


title: ANFO

text: ANFO under most conditions is detonator–insensitive, so it is legally classified as a blasting agent (tertiary explosive) and not a high explosive.


title: ANFO

text: Ammonium nitrate is widely used as a fertilizer in the agricultural industry. It is also found in instant cold packs. In many countries, its purchase and use are restricted to buyers who have obtained the proper license.


title: ANFO

text: Unmixed ammonium nitrate can decompose explosively, and has been responsible for several industrial disasters, including the following:


title: ANFO

text: Environmental hazards include eutrophication in confined waters and nitrate/gas oil contamination of ground or surface water.


title: ANFO

text: ANFO was used in 1970 when protests by students became violent at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who learned how to make and use ANFO from a Wisconsin Conservation Department booklet entitled "Pothole Blasting for Wildlife", resulting in the Sterling Hall bombing.


title: ANFO

text: ANFO used to be widely used by the FLNC (National Liberation Front of Corsica), along with f15 explosive. Five containers of each were used to blow up the Tax Office building in Bastia on 28 February 1987.


title: ANFO

text: The ANFO car bomb was adopted by the Provisional IRA in 1972 and, by 1973, the Troubles were consuming of ammonium nitrate for the majority of bombs. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) also made use of ANFO bombs, often mixing in gelignite as a booster, in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of May 1974 which killed 34 people & injured almost 300, ANFO car bombs were used in Dublin. The IRA detonated an ANFO truck bomb on Bishopsgate in London in 1993, killing one and causing £350 million in damage. It has also seen use by groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and ETA. In 1992, Shining Path perpetrated the Tarata bombing in Lima, Peru, using two ANFO truck bombs.


title: ANFO

text: A more sophisticated variant of ANFO (ammonium nitrate with nitromethane as the fuel, called ANNM) was used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.


title: ANFO

text: The Shijiazhuang bombings (Chinese: 靳如超爆炸案 or 石家庄"3·16"特大爆炸案) rocked the city of Shijiazhuang, China, on 16 March 2001. A total of 108 people were killed, and 38 others injured when, within a short time, several ANFO bombs exploded near four apartment buildings.


title: ANFO

text: In November 2009, the government of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan imposed a ban on ammonium sulfate, ammonium nitrate, and calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizers in the Upper Dir, Lower Dir, Swat, Chitral and Malakand districts (the former Malakand Division) following reports that those chemicals were used by militants to make explosives.


title: ANFO

text: In April 2010, police in Greece confiscated 180 kg of ANFO and other related material stashed in a hideaway in the Athens suburb of Kareas. The material was believed to be linked to attacks previously carried out by the "Revolutionary Struggle" terrorist group.


title: ANFO

text: In January 2010, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan also issued a decree banning the use, production, storage, purchase, or sale of ammonium nitrate, after an investigation showed militants in the Taliban insurgency had used the substance in bomb attacks.


title: ANFO

text: On 22 July 2011, an aluminium powder-enriched ANNM explosive, with total size of 950 kg (150 kg of aluminium powder), increasing demolition power by 10–30% over plain ANFO, was used in the Oslo bombing.


title: ANFO

text: On 6 March 2018, 8 members of the extreme right neo-Nazi group Combat 18 were arrested in Athens, Greece, accused of multiple attacks on immigrants and activists. They had 50 kg of ANFO in their possession.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: Origin is a 2017 mystery thriller novel by American author Dan Brown and the fifth installment in his "Robert Langdon" series, following "Inferno". The book was released on October 3, 2017, by Doubleday. The book is predominantly set in Spain and features minor sections in Sharjah and Budapest.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: Edmond Kirsch, a billionaire philanthropist, computer scientist, futurist, and strident atheist, attends a meeting at the Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey in Catalonia (Spain) with Roman Catholic Bishop Antonio Valdespino, Jewish Rabbi Yehuda Köves, and Muslim Imam Syed al-Fadl, members of the Parliament of the World's Religions. He informs them that he has made a revolutionary discovery that he plans to release to the public in a month. He has informed them out of respect, despite his hatred of organized religion, which he blames for his mother's death. The three learn that he is presenting it in three days' time, prompting Valdespino to demand that he stop.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: Kirsch hosts an event at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Among those in attendance are Kirsch's former teacher, Robert Langdon, and the Guggenheim's curator Ambra Vidal, the fiancée of the future King of Spain, Prince Julián. The guests receive a headset through which they communicate with a voice named Winston, which reveals to Langdon that it is an artificial intelligence invented by Kirsch. Winston leads Langdon to a private meeting with Kirsch, who claims that his presentation will reveal humanity's origins and future.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: During the presentation, which is broadcast worldwide, Kirsch reveals that he intends to end the age of religion and usher in an age of science. However, he is killed by Luis Ávila, a former naval admiral introduced to the controversial Palmarian Catholic Church following the deaths of his family in a bombing. Ávila was commissioned by "the Regent", someone claiming to be with the church. Meanwhile, both Al-Fadl and Köves are killed as well.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: While Ávila escapes, Langdon meets Ambra. He warns her not to trust Julián (as Ávila was put on the guest list by request from the Royal palace) and they escape his guards and leave the museum, determined to release Kirsch's discovery. They steal Kirsch's phone and escape with the help of Winston, who has Kirsch's personal jet fly them to Barcelona. Ambra reveals that the presentation is protected by a 47-character password, a line from Kirsch's favorite poem. Neither know which poem was chosen, but they deduce that it can be found at Kirsch's home, on Antoni Gaudí's Casa Milà.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: Meanwhile, the three murders have sparked worldwide outrage, fueled by information leaked by the anonymous source "Monte Iglesia". Word of the meeting in Catalonia spreads, and suspicion falls on Valdespino, who sneaks Julián off the palace grounds. To save face, the royal family's public relations manager claims that Langdon kidnapped Ambra.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: Langdon and Ambra go to Casa Milà, and search for the poem. Langdon learns that Kirsch was dying of pancreatic cancer, prompting a rushed release of the presentation. Langdon finds that Kirsch owned a book of the complete works of William Blake, which he donated to Sagrada Família, leaving it open at a specific page. The police arrive and, as Ambra tries to explain she wasn't kidnapped, Kirsch's phone is destroyed. A helicopter with two Guardia Real agents arrives and gets her and Langdon to safety. Langdon assures Ambra that he can find Winston's physical location, so he can broadcast the discovery, and the helicopter takes them to Sagrada Família.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: There, the two discover that the password is the final stanza of Four Zoas, "The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns". On the Regent's orders, Ávila arrives, killing both agents and chasing Langdon and Ambra. In an ensuing fight, Ávila falls to his death. Langdon and Ambra escape the police in the helicopter.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: Langdon finds Winston's source inside the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. They discover a device called E-Wave, a Mare Nostrum supercomputer which Kirsch calls 'Quantum cube'. After entering the password, the presentation starts, to hundreds of millions of viewers. Kirsch explains that he simulated the Miller-Urey experiment, using E-Wave's ability to digitally speed forward time, to recreate what he believes is the moment of abiogenesis. This is Kirsch's proof that humanity was created by natural events. He then claims that in roughly fifty years, humanity and technology will merge, hopefully creating a utopian future. The presentation sparks widespread debate. Ambra returns to the palace and Langdon is cleared of all charges. Winston reveals that, per Kirsch's will, he will self-delete the next day.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: Meanwhile, Valdespino brings Julián to his dying father in the Valley of the Fallen. The King admits that he is homosexual and Valdespino is his platonic lover. Both tell Julián not to follow old traditions, but to do what he feels is right for the country. The King dies during the night and Valdespino takes his own life to be with him. Julián makes amends with Ambra, and they decide to start their courtship over.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: The next day, going over all he has learned, Langdon realizes that Winston is Monte and the Regent. Winston had orchestrated Kirsch's murder to make him a martyr and destroy the Palmarians' reputation. He had intended for Ávila to be arrested, his death having been an accident. He then self-deletes, leaving Langdon shaken. Despite this, Langdon returns to Sagrada Família, where he and others of multiple races and religions are united by hope for the future.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: Brown visited many of the places in the book, for example the Guggenheim in Bilbao. He spent a great deal of time in Spain. Brown wrote and researched the book for four years. It is dedicated to his mother, who died in 2017. It had an initial printing of 2 million copies, with printing set for 42 languages.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: "The New York Times" complimented the book for focusing on "serious ideas" relating to religion and atheism, and whether religion and science can co-exist. It also said the book had a "geeky" humor. "The Guardian" found the apocalyptic "witches brew" of themes to be relevant to modern times, but it also noted the characters' dialogue made them sound like "cybernauts". Another "Guardian" review said the book was fun "in its own galumphing way."


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: "The Washington Post" panned the book, calling the themes and writing style "worn-out." "USA Today" gave it a score of 2.5/4 and said it was a "only a fitfully entertaining religious rehash of his greatest hits," but said fans of Langdon would like it. "The Daily Telegraph" said it was "light on action" and focused more on historical factoids and intellectual ideas, to its benefit. It gave it 3 of 5 stars. The review called Brown a good communicator but a "lousy" storyteller.


title: Origin (Brown novel)

text: In August 2018, the book was #1 on "The New York Times" bestseller list. It had been on the list for 23 weeks.


title: Á

text: Á, á (a-acute) is a letter of the Chinese (Pinyin), Blackfoot, Czech, Dutch, Faroese, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Lakota, Navajo, Occitan, Portuguese, Sámi, Slovak, Spanish, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Western Apache languages as a variant of the letter a. It is sometimes confused with à; e.g. "5 pommes á $1", which is supposed to be written as "5 pommes à $1" (meaning "5 apples at 1 dollar each" in French).


title: Á

text: In Dutch, the Á is used to put emphasis on an "a", either in a long "a" form like in "háár" ("hair"), or in a short form like in "kán" (the verb "can").


title: Á

text: In Irish, á is called "a fada" ("long a"), pronounced and appears in words such as "slán" ("goodbye"). It is the only diacritic used in Modern Irish, since the decline of the dot above many letters in the Irish language. Fada is only used on vowel letters i.e. á, é, í, ó, ú. It symbolises a lengthening of the vowel.


title: Á

text: In the 2018 amends of Kazakh alphabet list, Á is defined as the second letter and represents . It has been replaced by Ä ä in the 2019 amends, and matches Cyrillic alphabet Ә, 2017 version Aʼ and Arabic ٵ.


title: Á

text: In Portuguese, á is used to mark a stressed in words whose stressed syllable is in an abnormal location within the word, as in "lá" (there) and "rápido" (rapid, fast). If the location of the stressed syllable is predictable, the acute accent is not used. Á contrasts with â, pronounced .


title: Á

text: Á was once used in Scottish Gaelic, but has now been largely superseded by à. It can still be seen in certain writings, but it is no longer used in standard orthography.


title: Á

text: In Spanish, á is an accented letter, pronounced just the way a is. Both á and a sound like /a/. The accent indicates the stressed syllable in words with irregular stress patterns. It can also be used to "break up" a diphthong or to avoid what would otherwise be homonyms, although this does not happen with á, because a is a strong vowel and usually does not become a semivowel in a diphthong. See Diacritic and Acute accent for more details.


title: Á

text: In Welsh, word stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable, but one way of indicating stress on a final (short) vowel is through the use of the acute accent. The acute accent on "a" is often found in verbal nouns and borrowed words, for example, "casáu" "to hate", "caniatáu" "to allow", "carafán" "caravan".


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: The sinking of "Rainbow Warrior", codenamed Opération Satanique, was a state-sponsored terrorist bombing by the "action" branch of the French foreign intelligence services, the "Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure" (DGSE), carried out on 10 July 1985. During the operation, two operatives sank the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet, "Rainbow Warrior", at the Port of Auckland on her way to a protest against a planned French nuclear test in Moruroa. Fernando Pereira, a photographer, drowned on the sinking ship.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: France initially denied responsibility, but two French agents were captured by New Zealand Police and charged with arson, conspiracy to commit arson, willful damage, and murder. The scandal resulted in the resignation of the French Defence Minister Charles Hernu, while the two agents pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to ten years in prison. They spent a little over two years confined to the Polynesian island of Hao before being freed by the French government.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: Several political figures, including then New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange, have referred to the bombing as an act of terrorism or state-sponsored terrorism.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: France began testing nuclear weapons in 1966 on Mururoa Atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia. In 1985 the South Pacific nations of Australia, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu signed the Treaty of Rarotonga declaring the region a nuclear-free zone.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: Since being acquired by Greenpeace in 1977, "Rainbow Warrior" was active in supporting a number of anti-whaling, anti-seal hunting, anti-nuclear testing and anti-nuclear waste dumping campaigns during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since early 1985, the ship was based in the southern Pacific Ocean, where its crew campaigned against nuclear testing. After relocating 300 Marshall Islanders from Rongelap Atoll, which had been polluted by radioactive fallout by past American nuclear tests, it travelled to New Zealand to lead a flotilla of yachts protesting against French nuclear testing at the Mururoa Atoll.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: During previous nuclear tests at Mururoa, protest ships had been boarded by French commandos after sailing into the shipping exclusion zone around the atoll. For the 1985 tests, Greenpeace intended to monitor the impact of nuclear tests and place protesters on the island to monitor the blasts.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: French agents posing as interested supporters or tourists toured the ship while it was open to public viewing. DGSE agent Christine Cabon, who had previously worked on intelligence missions in the Middle East, posed as environmentalist "Frederique Bonlieu" in order to infiltrate the Greenpeace office in Auckland. While working for the Auckland office, Cabon secretly monitored communications from "Rainbow Warrior", collected maps, and investigated underwater equipment.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: Three agents on board the yacht "Ouvéa" imported the limpet mines used for the bombing. Two more agents, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, posing as the newlywed couple "Sophie and Alain Turenge", picked up the mines and delivered them to the bombing team, consisting of the divers Jean Camas ("Jacques Camurier") and Jean-Luc Kister ("Alain Tonel").


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: After sufficient information had been gathered, Camas and Kister attached two limpet mines to "Rainbow Warrior" berthed at Marsden Wharf. They were detonated seven minutes apart. The first bomb went off at 23:38, blasting a hole about the size of an average car. The agents may have intended the first mine to cripple the ship so that it would be evacuated safely by the time the second mine was detonated. However, the crew did not react to the first explosion as the agents had expected. While the ship was initially evacuated, some of the crew returned to the ship to investigate and film the damage. A Portuguese-Dutch photographer, Fernando Pereira, returned below deck to fetch his camera equipment. At 23:45, the second bomb went off. Pereira drowned in the rapid flooding that followed, and the other ten crew members either safely abandoned ship on the order of Captain Peter Willcox or were thrown into the water by the second explosion. "Rainbow Warrior" sank four minutes later.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: "Operation Satanic" was a public relations disaster. France, being an ally of New Zealand, initially denied involvement and joined in condemning what it described as a terrorist act. The French embassy in Wellington denied involvement, stating that "the French Government does not deal with its opponents in such ways".


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: After the bombing, the New Zealand Police started one of the country's largest police investigations. They identified two of the French agents, Captain Dominique Prieur and Commander Alain Mafart, as possible suspects. Prieur and Mafart were identified with the help of a Neighbourhood Watch group, and arrested. Both were questioned and investigated. Because they were carrying Swiss passports, their true identities were discovered, along with the French government's responsibility.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: The other agents of the French team all escaped from New Zealand. Christine Cabon, whose role had ended before the bombing, had left for Israel immediately prior to the sinking. After she was identified as a participant in the operation, Auckland police requested that the Israeli authorities detain her. Cabon was tipped off and fled before she could be arrested.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: Three other agents, Chief Petty Officer Roland Verge ("Raymond Velche"), Petty Officer Jean-Michel Bartelo ("Jean-Michel Berthelo") and Petty Officer Gérard Andries ("Eric Audrenc"), who had carried the bombs to New Zealand on the yacht "Ouvéa", escaped by that yacht, and were arrested by Australian police on Norfolk Island, but released as Australian law did not allow them to be held until the results of forensic tests came back. They were then picked up by the French submarine "Rubis", which scuttled "Ouvéa".


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: Several agents, including Jean-Luc Kister, one of the bombers, had posed as tourists. They took a ferry to the South Island, went skiing at Mt Hutt, and then left the country using false documents about 10 days later. Another agent, Louis-Pierre Dillais, possibly the commander of the operation, was also never captured.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: Once it was realised that the bombing was the action of the government of a friendly state, the New Zealand government stopped referring to it as a "terrorist act", instead calling it "a criminal attack in breach of the international law of state responsibility, committed on New Zealand sovereign territory". The "breach of international law" aspect was referred to in all communications with the United Nations in order to dissuade any arguments from the French government that might imply justification for their act.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: Prieur and Mafart pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to 10 years imprisonment on 22 November 1985. France threatened an economic embargo of New Zealand's exports to the European Economic Community if the pair were not released. Such an action would have crippled the New Zealand economy, which was dependent on agricultural exports to the United Kingdom.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: France launched their own commission of enquiry headed by which declared the French government innocent of any involvement in the terrorist act, claiming that the arrested agents, who had not yet pleaded guilty, had merely been spying on Greenpeace. When "The Times" and "Le Monde" contradicted these findings by claiming that President Mitterrand had approved the bombing, Defence Minister Charles Hernu resigned and the head of the DGSE, Admiral Pierre Lacoste, was fired. Eventually Prime Minister Laurent Fabius admitted the bombing had been a French plot: on 22 September 1985, he summoned journalists to his office to read a 200-word statement in which he said: "The truth is cruel," and acknowledged there had been a cover-up; he went on to say that "Agents of the French secret service sank this boat. They were acting on orders."


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: The next nuclear test "Héro" was conducted at Moruroa on the 24th October 1985 with a yield of . France would conduct 54 more nuclear tests until the end of nuclear testing in 1996.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: A Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior benefit concert at Mt. Smart Stadium, Auckland, on 5 April 1986 included performances by Herbs, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Topp Twins, Dave Dobbyn and a Split Enz reunion.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: "Rainbow Warrior" was refloated for forensic examination. She was deemed irreparable and scuttled in Matauri Bay, near the Cavalli Islands on 12 December 1987, to serve as a dive wreck and fish sanctuary. Her masts had been removed and put on display at the Dargaville Maritime Museum. Greenpeace acquired a new ship and gave it the name "Rainbow Warrior" earlier that same year. On 14 October 2011, Greenpeace launched a new sailing vessel, again called "Rainbow Warrior", which is equipped with an auxiliary electric motor. The ships are informally known as "Rainbow Warrior II" and "Rainbow Warrior III" respectively.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: In 1987, after international pressure, France paid $8.16m to Greenpeace in damages, which helped finance another ship. It also paid compensation to the Pereira family, reimbursing his life insurance company for 30,000 Dutch guilders and making reparation payments of 650,000 francs to Pereira's wife, 1.5 million francs to his two children, and 75,000 francs to each of his parents.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: The failure of Western leaders to condemn a violation of a friendly nation's sovereignty caused a great deal of change in New Zealand's foreign and defence policy. New Zealand distanced itself from the United States, a traditional ally, and built relationships with small South Pacific nations, while retaining excellent relations with Australia and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: In June 1986, in a political deal with Prime Minister of New Zealand David Lange, presided over by United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, France agreed to pay NZ$13 million (US$6.5 million) to New Zealand and apologise, in return for which Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur would be detained at the French military base on Hao Atoll for three years. However, the two agents had both returned to France by May 1988, after less than two years on the atoll. Mafart returned to Paris on 14 December 1987 for medical treatment, and was apparently freed after the treatment. He continued in the French Army and was promoted to colonel in 1993. Prieur returned to France on 6 May 1988 because she was pregnant, her husband having been allowed to join her on the atoll. She, too, was freed and later promoted. The removal of the agents from Hao without subsequent return was ruled to be in violation of the 1986 agreement.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: Following the breach of the arrangement, in 1990 the secretary-general awarded New Zealand another NZ$3.5 million (US$2 million), to establish the New Zealand / France Friendship Fund. Although France had formally apologised to the New Zealand Government in 1986, during a visit in April 1991 French Prime Minister Michel Rocard delivered a personal apology. He said it was "to turn the page in the relationship and to say, if we had known each other better, this thing never would have happened". The Friendship Fund has provided contributions to a number of charity and public purposes. During a visit in 2016, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls reiterated that the incident had been "a serious error".


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: In 2005, French newspaper "Le Monde" released a report from 1986 which said that Admiral Pierre Lacoste, head of DGSE at the time, had "personally obtained approval to sink the ship from the late president François Mitterrand." Soon after the publication, former Admiral Lacoste came forward and gave newspaper interviews about the situation, admitting that the death weighed on his conscience and saying that the aim of the operation had not been to kill. He acknowledged the existence of three teams: the yacht crew, reconnaissance and logistics (those successfully prosecuted), plus a two-man team that carried out the bombing.


title: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

text: A 20th anniversary memorial edition of the 1986 book "Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior" by New Zealand author David Robie – who was aboard the bombed ship – was published in July 2005.