This concept, which was created by a man whose lectures caused the first traffic jam on Broadway, was likened to a shell fragmenting into smaller shells, which then themselves fragment. For 10 points each:
[10h] Name this concept. Its creator described it as an “image” representing life as a self-creating movement trying to liberate itself from the constraints of matter, the opposite movement of self-destruction.
ANSWER: élan vital
[10m] Élan vital is posited as the opposite of many ideas of this process in Henri Bergson’s book on the creative form of it. Daniel Dennett wrote a book that calls this process its creator’s “dangerous idea.”
ANSWER: evolution [or creative evolution; accept natural selection]
[10e] This thinker helped depopularize Bergson by attacking him as anti-rational in an essay reprinted in his History of Western Philosophy. He wrote Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead.
ANSWER: Bertrand Russell
<Emmett Laurie, Philosophy>