Henri Bergson

1859-1941 · French · Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Time, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Biology, Aesthetics

Time is invention, or it is nothing at all.

When Henri Bergson lectured at the Collège de France after 1900, the rooms overflowed; fashionable Parisians arrived early to hear a philosopher argue that we have fundamentally misunderstood time. The son of a Polish-Jewish musician and an English mother, trained alongside Jaurès and Durkheim, he became a cultural event in his own lifetime — winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, and, in 1940, registering as a Jew under Vichy rather than accept the exemption his stature was offered.

Topics Henri Bergson addresses

• durée (duration)
• the critique of spatialized time
• intuition as philosophical method
• élan vital
• creative evolution
• the two multiplicities
• heterogeneous multiplicity
• differences in kind vs. differences in degree
• virtual and actual
• the body as action-center
• pure perception
• pure memory
• the cone of memory
• image (technical sense)
• habit-memory and recollection-memory
• planes of consciousness
• instinct, intelligence, and intuition
• the cinematographic illusion
• movement and the moving
• false problems
• the retrograde movement of the true
• the possible and the real
• mechanism and finalism critique
• closed and open society

Converse with Henri Bergson on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Henri Bergson's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.