66 Facts About Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.

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 as the Chair of Modern Philosophy until 1920.

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

Henri and Louise Bergson had a daughter, Jeanne, born deaf in 1896.

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

Henri Bergson had previously received a Jewish religious education, but lost his faith between the ages of 14 and 16.

At the lycee, Henri Bergson won a prize for his scientific work and another, in 1877, when he was 18, for the solution of a mathematical problem.

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

Henri Bergson obtained there the degree of licence es lettres, and then an 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 Lucretius's materialist cosmology, 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 Heraclitus.

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

In 1896, Henri Bergson published his second major work, Matter and Memory.

Henri Bergson 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 that year was promoted 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 paper, "Psychological Origins of the Belief in the Law of Causality".

At that time, Henri Bergson had already extensively studied 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.

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.

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

Henri Bergson quoted the first two of these in 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.

Henri Bergson's influence 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, 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 and lectured in several American cities, where very large audiences welcomed him.

In 1914 Henri Bergson's 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 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 11 lectures, under the title The Problem of Personality, at the University of Edinburgh in the spring of that year.

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

Henri Bergson contributed to the publication arranged by The Daily Telegraph in honour of King Albert I of Belgium, 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 that led to the entry of the United States into the war.

Henri Bergson was there when the French Mission under Rene Viviani paid a visit in April and May 1917 after 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 the posts and honours previously awarded him rather than accept exemption from the antisemitic laws of the Vichy government.

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

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

Henri Bergson argued that free will must be allowed 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 regards planning 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 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 was cited more than philosopher Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel.

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.