65 Facts About Henri Bergson

Henri-Louis Bergson was a French philosopher who was influential in the tradition of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War, but after 1966 when Gilles Deleuze published Le Bergsonisme.

Henri Bergson was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented".

Henri Bergson lived the quiet life of a French professor, marked by the publication of his four principal works:.

Henri Bergson then replaced Gabriel Tarde in the Chair of Modern Philosophy, which he held until 1920.

Henri Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier in 1859.

Henri Bergson's great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry, especially those associated with the Hasidic movement.

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.

Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, in 1891.

Henri Bergson attended the Lycee Fontanes in Paris from 1868 to 1878.

Henri Bergson's solution was published the following year in Nouvelles Annales de Mathematiques.

Henri Bergson obtained there the degree of licence es lettres, and this was followed by that of agregation de philosophie in 1881 from the University of Paris.

The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand, Henri Bergson displayed his ability in the humanities by the publication of an edition of extracts from Lucretius, with a critical study of De Rerum Natura, issued as Extraits de Lucrece, and of the materialist cosmology of the poet, repeated editions of which attest to its value in promoting Classics among French youth.

Henri Bergson crafted his dissertation Time and Free Will, which was submitted, along with a short Latin thesis on Aristotle for his doctoral degree, which was awarded by the University of Paris in 1889.

Henri Bergson gave courses in Clermont-Ferrand on the Pre-Socratics, in particular on Heraclitus.

Henri Bergson dedicated Time and Free Will to Jules Lachelier, then public education minister, a disciple of Felix Ravaisson and the author of a philosophical work On the Founding of Induction.

Henri Bergson had spent years of research in preparation for each of his three large works.

In 1898, Henri Bergson became maitre de conferences at his alma mater, Ecole Normale Superieure, and later in the same year received a promotion to a Professorship.

At the first International Congress of Philosophy, held in Paris during the first five days of August 1900, Henri Bergson read a short, but important, paper, "Psychological Origins of the Belief in the Law of Causality".

At that time, Henri Bergson had already made an extensive study of biology including the theory of fecundation, which had only recently emerged, ca.

Henri Bergson quoted Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard, the successor of Claude Bernard at the Chair of Experimental Medicine in the College de France, etc.

Henri 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.

Henri Bergson traveled to London in 1908 and met there with William James, the Harvard philosopher who was Henri Bergson's senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor.

James's impression of Henri Bergson is given in his Letters under date of 4 October 1908:.

Henri Bergson quoted the first two of these articles in his 1889 work, Time and Free Will.

The most noteworthy tributes James paid to Henri Bergson come in the Hibbert Lectures, which James gave at Manchester College, Oxford, shortly after meeting Henri Bergson in London.

The influence of Henri 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".

Henri Bergson's speeches offered new Perspectives and elucidated many passages in his three major works: Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution.

In May 1911, Henri Bergson gave two lectures entitled The Perception of Change at the University of Oxford.

Henri Bergson's talks were concise and lucid, leading students and the general reader to his other, longer writings.

In 1913, Henri 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 1914 Henri Bergson's fellow-countrymen honoured him by his election as a member of the Academie francaise.

Henri Bergson was made President of the Academie des Sciences morales et politiques, and in addition, he became Officier de la Legion d'honneur, and Officier de l'Instruction publique.

In 1914, the Scottish universities arranged for Henri Bergson to give the famous Gifford Lectures, planning one course for the spring and another for the autumn.

Henri 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.

Henri Bergson was not silent during the conflict, and he gave some inspiring addresses.

Henri Bergson contributed to the publication arranged by The Daily Telegraph in honour of King Albert I of the Belgians, King Albert's Book.

Henri Bergson did a large amount of traveling and lecturing in America during the war.

Henri Bergson participated in the negotiations which led to the entry of the United States in the war.

Henri Bergson was there when the French Mission under Rene Viviani paid a visit in April and May 1917, following upon America's entry into the conflict.

Signs of Henri Bergson's growing interest in social ethics and in the idea of a future life of personal survival are manifested.

The volume is a most welcome production and serves to bring together what Henri Bergson wrote on the concept of mental force, and on his view of "tension" and "detension" as applied to the relation of matter and mind.

Henri Bergson retained the chair, but no longer delivered lectures, his place being taken by his disciple, the mathematician and philosopher Edouard Le Roy, who supported a conventionalist stance on the foundations of mathematics, which was adopted by Bergson.

Le Roy, who succeeded to Henri Bergson at the Academie francaise 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.

Henri Bergson was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1928.

Henri Bergson 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.

Henri Bergson was 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.

On 3 January 1941, Henri Bergson died in occupied Paris from bronchitis.

Henri Bergson rejected what he saw as the overly mechanistic predominant view of causality.

Henri Bergson argued that we must allow space for free will to unfold in an autonomous and unpredictable fashion.

Henri Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces.

Henri Bergson's philosophy emphasizes pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterize his system as a process philosophy.

Intelligence, for Henri Bergson, is a practical faculty rather than a pure speculative faculty, a product of evolution used by man to survive.

Henri Bergson regarded planning beforehand for the future as impossible, since time itself unravels unforeseen possibilities.

Henri 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.

Henri Bergson responded that Kant, along with many other philosophers, had confused time with its spatial representation.

In reality, Henri 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.

Duration, as defined by Henri Bergson, then is a unity and a multiplicity, but, being mobile, it cannot be grasped through immobile concepts.

Henri Bergson hence argues that one can grasp it only through his method of intuition.

Henri Bergson portrays elan 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.

In Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Henri Bergson develops a theory not of laughter itself but of how laughter can be provoked.

However, Henri Bergson warns us that laughter's criterion of what should be laughed at is not a moral criterion and that it can in fact cause serious damage to a person's self-esteem.

From his first publications, Henri Bergson's philosophy attracted strong criticism from different quarters, although he became very popular and durably influenced French philosophy.

Henri Bergson influenced the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, although Merleau-Ponty had reservations about Henri Bergson's philosophy.

Henri Bergson writes that despite the philosopher and his philosophy being very popular during the early years of the twentieth century, his ideas had been critiqued and then rejected first by phenomenology, then by existentialism, and finally by post-structuralism.

Whether this represents a direct influence of Henri Bergson is disputed, although Aurobindo was familiar with many Western philosophers.