When I read I dogear pages with especially interesting quotes on them, & in this book I dogeared almost every page...& on each page I can't tell now what quote I was dogearing for, because everything he says is so amazing. This book is so beautiful with its ingenius motion through psychology, architecture, poetry, & on & on. Of all the books in my personal library, this is one of the very most highly recommended from me to any reader. I am sure that no one was mistaken in hailing Bachelard as one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers.

This is a must-read for ANYONE interested in the arts, architecture, home buying, renovation, interior designing. Along with his in-depth exploration of how spaces work within our minds, he leads to beautiful poetic passages that will leave you breathless no matter how well read you are. After reading this book you will no longer think of the world around you as a vacuum to be rushed through. Everywhere has meaning.

How do we associate emotional relationship to intimate spaces? This is the basic premise of this book. Gaston Bachelard unleashes our imaginations as he helps us to explore these feelings with an journey through our house - a sacred place that holds dear to most of us, a place that we grew up, a place that is full of memories both from our childhood and our present existence.

From the cellar to the attic, Bachelard also shows that these fantasies are not only common to all of us, but also can be viewed in a greater context and reflected in literary works, poetries, philosophies, etc. Also, these kinds of primal response also can be reflected in our relationship with natural spatial objects like nests and shells. It also deals with the metaphysical question of outside and inside.

This is a book that is full of philosophical treasures and wonders!

Bachelard's book on reverie wonderfully explores the space that looms somewhere in between wakefulness and dream. Reverie is a form of consciousness that departs from the words of poets and then grows. Each section of this essay refines or sketches further some of the liminal suggestions of the author. Some of these excursions resonate more sensibly than others of course, but all of the chapters thoughtfully meditate on a placid and exciting state. I do not think the second section on the significance of word gender is terribly fruitful, since gender is a grammatical rather than semantic property, but even such meanderings around and slight abuses of traditional understandings leads to some joyful venues and phenomenal considerations. A book need not be useful to be pleasant. This book has a mite of the former quality and a might of the latter quality.

Bachelard's Poetics of Reverie is a fascinating, fascinating book, but those with no previous training in phenomenology might want to do some intro reading first. A must-read for anyone who's ever tried their hand at creative writing, especially poetry, and a must-read for anyone whose mind has ever been stuck in a state of reverie concerning the world around them.

This little book constitutes, for me, an excellent introductory piece to the thoughts of Gaston Bachelard. Much more clearly than "Poetics of Space", or "The Right to Dream", this book gives insight into Bachelard's transition from scientist to philosopher. If you haven't yet read any of his works, you should consider doing so if only to reevaluate your own methods of analysis of the world around you, both the material and the immaterial. In the "Psychoanalysis of Fire" Bachelard turns his sciento-phenomonologist methods of analysis to the existence of fire, both as a real presence throughout the history of mankind and as a literary, symbolic presence with perhaps even more significance.

Forget about The Poetics of Space (for now) and immerse yourself in The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Watch Bachelard circle and destroy modern rationality through a proto-rationalistic, Socratic assault on the concept of fire. Bachelard's subject is the 'concept' rather than the real thing, fire itself, the number one immaterial 'substance' prefiguring even light. Read, in amazement, as scientific scrutiny of this primordial phenomenon approaches farce. But pay very, very, very close attention to the section on Novalis, "Psychoanalysis and Prehistory: The Novalis Complex", and you'll find Bachelard's genius swooping in for the kill. "These scientific explanations originate in an arid and cursory rationalism which claims to be profiting by recurring factual evidence; but which is, however, quite unrelated to the psychological conditions of the primitive discoveries." Bachelard is not the prophet of surrationalism for nothing! It is this book (first published in 1938) that locates his critical method at the forefront of philosophical critical idealism. Unlike Ernst Cassirer, Bachelard is more than willing to take the plunge into the abyss of imagination - that Coleridgean imagination that is the mostly unacknowledged source of our collective intelligence.

This book, by a French philosopher of science, was originally published in 1940. It seems noteworthy for its early positive recognition of Alfred Korzybski's work. Bachelard wrote: "Those of us who are trying to find new ways of thinking, must direct ourselves towards the most complicated structures. We must take advantage of all the lessons of science, however special they may be, to determine new mental structures. We must realize that the possession of a form of thought is automatically a reform of the mind. We must therefore direct our researches towards a new pedagogy. In this direction, which has attracted us personally for a number of years, we shall take as our guide the very important work of the non-Aristotelian school, founded in America by Korzybski, which is so little known in France" (108). I also found noteworthy, from a general-semantics perspective, Bachelard's discussion of his "epistemological profile." The epistemological profile provides a standard for evaluating the underlying assumptions of scientific discussions. This was reworked by general-semantics writer J. Samuel Bois and provides the basis for a scheme of viewing personal and cultural development. Bachelard's writing style, dense and metaphorical, lacks sufficient clarity for me at times. Nonetheless, I found the book stimulating enough to recommend to other explorers of thought. The philosophy of no is definitely not out of date.