Nineteenth Century Philosophy

Intuitionism

Who was Henri Bergson?

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was professor at the Collège de France and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is most famous for his Time and Free Will (1889) in which he argued that objective measurable time, which can be divided into equal segments, is not the same as real time, which we experience directly. In Matter and Memory (1896) he offered a mind–body theory consistent with his later work on evolution in which he argued that a creative urge, rather than Darwinian natural selection, is what causes evolution. In An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) he provided further support for his theory of time. In Creative Evolution (1907) he claimed that a life force is necessary to explain evolution, and in Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1935) he claimed that there are two kinds of society: one free and allowing for reform and creativity, the other stagnant, conservative, and repressive.