Henri Bergson on Time and Free Will

Henri Bergson is one of our most significant vitalist thinkers who from the late 1800s until his death in 1941 offers one of the most sophisticated modern versions of vitalism. His work is constructed as a reaction to variety of strains of rationalist thought as found in the likes of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Auguste Comte. In contrast, Bergson emphasizes themes of life, vitality, duration, creativity - themes which he developed in a collection of works famed for their prose style and his use of metaphor and imagery. Notably, Bergson would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. His work is famed for a recursive expression of life itself. His writings are not strictly representation of his themes, they are written to express what life itself is. We can find the common denominator of many themes of his work in his 1889 work Time and Free Will [Essai sur les donnes immédiates de la conscience – Essay on the Immediate Givens of Consciousness (roughly)]. In this lecture then I will explain the core themes of Time and Free Will.  I will begin with a short biography of Bergson to give you a sense of the man. Subsequently, I will talk about the overall core themes of time and free will, Bergson’s famous distinctions between time and space, the qualitative and quantitative, his theory of duration and how that tells us about why the human being is fundamentally free.

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