Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson | |
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École Normale Supérieure | |
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Louise Neuberger (m. 1891) |
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Henri-Louis Bergson (French:
Bergson was awarded the 1927
Biography
Overview
Bergson lived the quiet life of a French professor, marked by the publication of his four principal works:
- in 1889, Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience)
- in 1896, Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire)
- in 1907, Creative Evolution (L'Évolution créatrice)
- in 1932, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion)
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.[16]
Early years
Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the
King of Poland from 1764 to 1795.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, and Henri became a naturalized French citizen.
Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, in 1891. (The novelist served as best man at Bergson's wedding.)[17] 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.
Education and career
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.[18] 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 a common ancestry with modern primates, a process sometimes construed as not needing a creative deity.[19]
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
The same year he received a teaching appointment at the
The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand, Bergson displayed his ability in the humanities by the publication of an edition of extracts from
Bergson dedicated Time and Free Will to
Bergson settled again in Paris in 1888,
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 relationship 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.
In 1898, Bergson became
At the first
In 1901, the
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 suicide.[26][27]
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 a new direction in thought.[28] 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.
At that time, Bergson had already made an extensive study of
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.[29]
Relationship with James and pragmatism
Bergson travelled to London in 1908 and met there with
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.
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[who?], 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.
William James hailed Bergson as an ally. In 1903, he wrote:
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.[30]
The most noteworthy tributes James paid to Bergson come in the
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".
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.
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.
Lectures on change
In May 1911, Bergson gave two lectures entitled The Perception of Change (La perception du changement) at the
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 travelled 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].
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).
Meanwhile, his popularity increased, and translations of his works began to appear in a number of languages:
Bergson found disciples of many types. In France movements such as
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
Later years
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.
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.
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).[33] 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.
Early in 1918, the
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,
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.[34] 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.
Debate with Albert Einstein
In 1922, Bergson's book Durée et simultanéité, à propos de la théorie d'Einstein (Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe) was published.[35] Earlier that year, Albert Einstein had come to the French Society of Philosophy and briefly replied to a short speech made by Bergson.[36] It has been alleged that Bergson's knowledge of physics was insufficient and that the book did not follow up contemporary developments on physics.[by whom?] 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.[37] 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.).[38]
Later years and death
While living with his wife and daughter in a modest house in a quiet street near the
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[21]). 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.
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."
On 3 January 1941, Bergson died in occupied Paris from bronchitis.[43] A Roman Catholic priest said prayers at his funeral per his request. Bergson is buried in the Cimetière de Garches, Hauts-de-Seine.
Philosophy
Bergson rejected what he saw as the overly mechanistic predominant view of causality (as expressed in reductionism). He argued that free will must be allowed 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.[44]
Creativity
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
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 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 himself in water, and only then can thought to 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.[46]
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.[47]
Bergson's
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
Duration
The foundation of Henri Bergson's philosophy, his theory of Duration, he discovered when trying to improve the inadequacies of Herbert Spencer's philosophy.[48] 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.[49]
Kant believed that free will could only exist outside of time and space, indeed the only non-determined aspect of private existence in the universe, separate from water cycles, mathematics and mortality. However, it could therefore not be ascertained whether or not it exists, and that it is nothing but a pragmatic faith.[49] Bergson responded that Kant, along with many other philosophers, had confused time with its spatial representation.[50] 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.[51] For Bergson, reality is composed of change.[52]
Intuitionism
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 offer a model of the city through a construction of photographs taken from every possible point of view, yet it can never produce 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.[53]
Élan vital
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
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.[55]
Laughter
In
Reception
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".[57]
Many writers of the early 20th century criticized Bergson's
The
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."[79] 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."[80] Gilles Deleuze, however, saw much in common between Bergson's philosophy and that of Peirce - exploring the many connections between them in Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. 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).[81] 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"[page needed]. 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".
As early as the 1890s, Santayana attacked certain key concepts in Bergson's philosophy, above all his view of the new and the indeterminate:
"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."
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 plausible 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[page needed] and A History of Western Philosophy [82] ).
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.'"[87]
Japanese philosopher Yasushi Hirai from Fukuoka University has led a collaborative and interdisciplinary project since 2007, bringing together Eastern and Western philosophers and scientists to discuss and promote Bergson's work.[88] This has influenced the development of specific artificial neural networks which incorporate features inspired by Bergson's philosophy of memory.[89][90]
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."[91]
Comparison to Indian philosophies
Several
Bibliography
- Bergson, H.; The Philosophy of Poetry: The Genius of Lucretius (La Philosophie de la Poesie: le Génie de Lucrèce, 1884), Philosophical Library 1959: ISBN 978-1-4976-7566-7
- Bergson, H.; ISBN 0-486-41767-0– Bergson's doctoral dissertation.
- Bergson, H.; ISBN 0-486-43415-X.
- Bergson, H.; ISBN 0-486-44380-9.
- Bergson, H.; ISBN 1-59605-309-7.
- Bergson, H.; Mind-energy (L'Énergie spirituelle, 1919). McMillan 1920. – a collection of essays and lectures. On Archive.org.
- Bergson, H.; Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe (Durée et simultanéité, 1922). Clinamen Press Ltd 1999. ISBN 1-903083-01-X.
- Bergson, H.; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion, 1932). University of Notre Dame Press 1977. ISBN 0-268-01835-9. On Archive.org.
- Bergson, H.; The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (La Pensée et le mouvant, 1934). Citadel Press 1946: ISBN 0-8065-2326-3– essay collection, sequel to Mind-Energy, including 1903's "An Introduction to Metaphysics."
See also
References
- ^ John Ó Maoilearca, Beth Lord (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy, Bloomsbury Academic, 2009, p. 204.
- ^ "Process Philosophy". Process Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2022.
- ^ Astesiano, Lionel: Joie et liberté chez Bergson et Spinoza. (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2016)
- ^
Hancock, Curtis L. (May 1995). "The Influence of Plotinus on Berson's Critique of Empirical Science". In R. Baine Harris (ed.). Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought. Congress of the ISBN 978-0-7914-5275-2. Retrieved 10 May 2010.
That the philosophy of Henri Bergson is significantly influenced by the doctrines of Plotinus is indicated by the many years Bergson devoted to teaching Plotinus and the many parallels in their respective philosophies. This influence has been discussed at some length by Bergson's contemporaries, such as Emile Bréhier and Rose-Marie Rossé-Bastide. ...
- ^ R. William Rauch, Politics and Belief in Contemporary France: Emmanuel Mounier and Christian Democracy, 1932–1950, Springer, 2012, p. 67.
- ^ Sorel, Georges. "Preface by Jeremy Jennings". Reflections on violence.
- ^ a b Gelber, Nathan Michael (1 January 2007). "Bergson". Encyclopaedia Judaica. Archived from the original on 29 March 2015. Retrieved 7 December 2015.
- ^ ISBN 978-0195382655.
- ^ a b Henri Bergson. 2014. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 13 August 2014, from https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/61856/Henri-Bergson
- ^ a b "Z ziemi polskiej do Nobla" [From the Polish lands to the Nobel Prize]. Wprost (in Polish). Warsaw: Agencja Wydawniczo-Reklamowa Wprost. 4 January 2008. Retrieved 10 May 2010.
Polskie korzenie ma Henri Bergson, jeden z najwybitniejszych pisarzy, fizyk i filozof francuski żydowskiego pochodzenia. Jego ojcem był Michał Bergson z Warszawy, prawnuk Szmula Jakubowicza Sonnenberga, zwanego Zbytkowerem (1756–1801), żydowskiego kupca i bankiera. [Translation: Henri Bergson, one of the greatest French writers, physicists and philosophers of Jewish ancestry, had Polish roots. His father was Michael Bergson from Warsaw, the great-grandson of Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg – known as Zbytkower – (1756–1801), a Jewish merchant and banker.]
- ^ a b Testament starozakonnego Berka Szmula Sonnenberga z 1818 roku Archived 28 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine
- ISBN 0-520-06062-8.
- ^ "The Nobel prize in Literature". Retrieved 15 November 2010.
- ISBN 0919813305
- ^ "Matter and memory" (PDF). antilogicalism.com. July 2017. Retrieved 9 April 2023.
- ^ Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2007, p. 9.
- ^ Lawlor, Leonard and Moulard Leonard, Valentine, "Henri Bergson", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/bergson/>
- ^ Henri Hude, Bergson, Paris, Editions Universitaires, 1990, 2 volumes, quoted by Anne Fagot-Largeau in her 21 December 2006 course at the College of France
- ^ Gerono, Camille Christopher; Terquem, Oiry; Laisant, Charles-Ange; Bricard, Raoul; Boulanger, Auguste (1878). "Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques". 2 (17). Paris: 268. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
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(help) - ^ College of France(audio file of the course)
- ^ Louis de Broglie, (1969[1947]) The concept of contemporary physics and Bergson’s Ideas on Time and Motion, in Bergson and the evolution of physics, Pete A.Y. Gunter (Ed. and trans.) Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, p47.
- ^ Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey. London: Continuum, 2002, p. ix.
- ^ p. 39
- ^ Seth Benedict Graham A CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE RUSSO-SOVIET ANEKDOT, 2003, p. 2
- ^ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Jacques Maritain
- ^ "Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism". Notre Dame University Press. Retrieved 15 July 2023.
- ISBN 978-1-4191-0968-3.
- ^ "Florence Meyer Blumenthal". Jewish Women's Archive, Michele Siegel.
- ^ Bergson and his philosophy Chapter 1: Life of Bergson
- ^ Bergson, Henri (1911). La perception du changement; conférences faites à l'Université d'Oxford les 26 et 27 mai 1911 [The perception of change: lectures delivered at the University of Oxford on 26 and 27 May 1911] (in French). Oxford: Clarendon. p. 37.
- ^
JSTOR 3777267.
... deux organes, d'ailleurs si dissembables, ou s'exprime l'extrême-gauche du courant socialiste français: le Mouvement socialiste d'Hubert Lagardelle et la Guerre sociale de Gustave Hervé. Jeune publications – le Mouvement socialiste est fondé en janvier 1899, la Guerre sociale en décembre 1906 –, dirigées par de jeunes équipes qui faisaient profession de rejeter le chauvinisme, d'être attentives au nouveau et de ne pas reculer devant les prises de position les plus véhémentes, ...
- ^ King Albert's book: a tribute to the Belgian king and people from representative men and women throughout the world. London: The Daily Telegraph. 1914. p. 187.
- ^ See Chapter III of The Creative Evolution
- ^ Canales J., The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, Princeton, Princeton Press, 2015.
- ^ Minutes of the meeting:Séance du 6 Avril 1922
- ^ Signs, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, trans. Richard C. McCleary, Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964.
- ^ On the relation between Einstein and Bergson in this committee, see Einstein, Bergson and the Experiment that Failed: Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine. On the involvement of Bergson (and Einstein) in the Committee in general, see Grandjean, Martin (2018). Les réseaux de la coopération intellectuelle. La Société des Nations comme actrice des échanges scientifiques et culturels dans l'entre-deux-guerres [The Networks of Intellectual Cooperation. The League of Nations as an Actor of the Scientific and Cultural Exchanges in the Inter-War Period] (in French). Lausanne: Université de Lausanne..
- ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 16 June 2011.
- ISBN 978-1-58617-287-9.
- ^ Gilbert, Martin. The Second World War: A Complete History (p. 129). Rosetta Books. Kindle Edition.
- ^ Forgotten Converts, Gary Potter, 2006.
- ISBN 978-0-8153-3351-7.
- ^ Lawlor, Leonard; Moulard Leonard, Valentine (2016), "Henri Bergson", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 10 December 2019
- ^ Bergson explores these topics in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, in Matter and Memory, in Creative Evolution, and in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics.
- ^ Elie During, « Fantômes de problèmes » Archived 28 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine, published by the Centre International d'Etudes de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine (short version first published in Le magazine littéraire, n°386, April 2000 (issue dedicated to Bergson)
- ^ The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, pages 11 to 14
- ^ a b Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, pages 11 to 13.
- ^ a b The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Henri Bergson": "'Time and Free Will' has to be seen as an attack on Kant, for whom freedom belongs to a realm outside of space and time."
- ^ Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Author's Preface.
- ^ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Henri Bergson": "For Bergson – and perhaps this is his greatest insight – freedom is mobility."
- ISBN 978-1-7936-4081-9.
- ^ Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, pages 160 to 161. For a Whiteheadian use of Bergsonian intuition, see Michel Weber's Whitehead’s Pancreativism. The Basics. Foreword by Nicholas Rescher, Frankfurt / Paris, Ontos Verlag, 2006.
- ^ L'Évolution créatrice, pp. 42–44; pp. 226–227
- ^ L'Évolution créatrice, pp. 42–43
- ^ Henri Bergson's theory of laughter Archived 14 May 2009 at the Wayback Machine. A brief summary.
- ^ Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006, p. 10
- ^ Cf. Ronny Desmet and Michel Weber (edited by), Whitehead. The Algebra of Metaphysics. Applied Process Metaphysics Summer Institute Memorandum, Louvain-la-Neuve, Éditions Chromatika, 2010 & Michel Weber, Whitehead’s Pancreativism. The Basics. Foreword by Nicholas Rescher, Frankfurt / Paris, ontos verlag, 2006.
- ^ Russell, B.; "The Philosophy of Bergson," The Monist 1912 vol. 22 pp. 321–347
- ^ entitled Henri Bergson.
- ^ transl. 1988.
- ISBN 9604040480.
- ISBN 9786185154189.
- ^ Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, 2000, pp. 322 and 393.
- ^
ISBN 1-57392-915-8.
- ^ Peter Bien, Three Generations of Greek Writers, Published by Efstathiadis Group, Athens, 1983
- ^ see his short book
ISBN 0-8414-7371-4.on the subject).
- ^ see his study on the author in "Winds of Doctrine"
- ^ see Being and Time, esp. sections 5, 10, and 82.
- ^ see his two books on the subject
- ^ Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927), ed. Paul Edwards, Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1993.
- ^ "The Irrational Element in Poetry." 1936. Opus Posthumous. 1957. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Random House, 1990.
- ^ see his book Insights and Illusions of Philosophy 1972
- ^ see "Against Epistemology"
- ^ see "Hegel and Marxism"
- ^ see his early book Imagination – although Sartre also appropriated himself Bergsonian thesis on novelty as pure creation – see Situations I Gallimard 1947, p. 314
- ^ see the latter's two books on the subject: Le Bergsonisme, une Mystification Philosophique and La fin d'une parade philosophique: le Bergsonisme both of which had a tremendous effect on French existential phenomenology
- ^ see Bergson and Symbolism
- ^ Perry, Ralph Barton (1935). The thought and character of William James, as revealed in unpublished correspondence and notes, together with his published writings. Boston, Little, Brown, and company.
- ^ Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Volume VII & VIII, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966, p. 428.
- ^ David Deamer, Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility, London and New York, Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 27.
- ^ Russell, Bertrand (1945). A History of Western Philosophy. Rockefeller Center, 630 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY 10020: Simon and Schuster. p. 802.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location (link) - ^ Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006, p. 175.
- ^ Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard (12 July 2011) [18 May 2004], "The revitalization of Bergsonism", Henri Bergson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, retrieved 20 August 2012
- ^ Mark Sinclair, Bergson, New York: Routledge, 2020, pp. 256-269.
- ^ a b Mark Sinclair, Bergson, New York: Routledge, 2020, pp. 270.
- ^ "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977".
- ^ "Project Bergson in Japan".
- ^ "Burns, Benureau, Tani (2018) A Bergson-Inspired Adaptive Time Constant for the Multiple Timescales Recurrent Neural Network Model. JNNS".
- ^ "Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Japanese Neural Network Society (October 2018)" (PDF).
- ISBN 978-1914568060.
- ^ K Mackenzie Brown. "Hindu perspectives on evolution: Darwin, Dharma, and Design". Routledge, Jan 2012. Page 164-166
- ^ KN Aiyer. "Professor Bergson and the Hindu Vedanta". Vasanta Press. 1910. Pages 36 – 37.
- ^ Marie Tudor Garland. "Hindu Mind Training". Longmans, Green and Company, 1917. Page 20.
- ^ Nalini Kanta Brahma. "Philosophy of Hindu Sadhana". PHI Learning Private Ltd 2008.
- ^ Hope K Fitz. "Intuition: Its nature and uses in human experience." Motilal Banarsidass publishers 2000. Pages 22–30.
Further reading
- Ansell-Pearson, Keith. Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life. London: Routledge, 2002.
- Ansell-Pearson, Keith. Bergson. Thinking Beyond the Human Condition. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
- Bachelard, Gaston. The Dialectic of Duration. Trans. Mary Mcallester Jones. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000.
- Bianco, Giuseppe. Après Bergson. Portrait de groupe avec philosophe. Paris, PUF, 2015.
- Canales, Jimena. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton, Princeton Press, 2015.
- Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
- Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
- Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
- Fradet, Pierre-Alexandre, Derrida-Bergson. Sur l'immédiateté, ISBN 978-2-7056-8831-8
- Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
- Guerlac, Suzanne. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
- Horkheimer, Max. "On Bergson's Metaphysics of Time." Trans. Peter Thomas, revised by Stewart Martin. Radical Philosophy 131 (2005) 9–19.
- James, William. "Bergson and his Critique of Intellectualism." In A Pluralistic Universe. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. 223–74.
- Lawlor, Leonard. The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics. London: Continuum Press, 2003.
- Lovasz, Adam. Updating Bergson. A Philosophy of the Enduring Present. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "Bergson." In In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. John O'Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963. 9–32.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "Bergson in the Making." In Signs. Trans. Richard McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 182–91.
- Mullarkey, John. Bergson and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
- Mullarkey, John, ed. The New Bergson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999.
- Russell, Bertrand "The Philosophy of Bergson". The Monist 22 (1912): 321–47.
- Sinclair, Mark. Bergson, New York: Routledge, 2020.
External links
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
- Henri Bergson's theory of laughter. A brief summary.
- « 'A History of Problems' : Bergson and the French Epistemological Tradition », by Elie During
- Gontarski, Stanley E.: Bergson, Henri, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
- M. C. Sanchez Rey « The Bergsonian Philosophy of the Intelligence » translation
- Newspaper clippings about Henri Bergson in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
- Henri Bergson, Nobel Luminaries - Jewish Nobel Prize Winners, on the Beit Hatfutsot-The Museum of the Jewish People Website.
- Henri Bergson on Nobelprize.org
- List of Works
Works online
- Works by Henri Bergson at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Henri Bergson at Internet Archive
- Works by Henri Bergson at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Works by Henri Bergson at Open Library
- Works by Henri Bergson in French at "La Philosophie"
- Complete works in French on the "Classiques des sciences sociales" website
- L'Évolution créatrice (in the original French, 1907)
- 1911 English translation at the Wayback Machine (archived 23 April 2006) of Creative Evolution (HTML)
- Multiple formats at Internet Archive
- 1910 English translation of Time and Free Will at the Wayback Machine (archived 24 April 2006) (HTML)
- Multiple formats at Internet Archive
- 1911 English translation of Matter and Memory at the Wayback Machine (archived 24 April 2006) (HTML)
- Multiple formats at Internet Archive