Henri Bergson – författare

Bergson argues for free will by showing that the arguments against it come from a confusion of different conceptions of time. As opposed to physicists' idea of measurable time, life is perceived in human experience as a continuous and immeasurable flow rather than as a succession of marked-off states of consciousness.

The twentieth century – with its unprecedented advances in technology and scientific understanding – saw the birth of a distinctively new and ‘modern’ age. Henri Bergson stood as one of the most important philosophical voices of that tumultuous time. An intellectual celebrity in his own life time, his work was widely discussed by such thinkers as William James, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, as well as having a profound influence on modernist writers such as Wallace Stevens, Willa Cather and Wyndham Lewis and later thinkers, most notably Gilles Deleuze.Key Writings brings together Bergson’s most essential writings in a single volume, including crucial passages from major works such as Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution, Mind-Energy, The Creative Mind, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion and Laughter. The book also includes Bergson’s correspondence with William James and a chronology of his life and work.

First published in French in 1907, Henri Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice is a scintillating and radical work by one of the great French philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This outstanding new translation, the first for over a hundred years, brings one of Bergson’s most important and ambitious works to a new generation of readers.A sympathetic though critical reader of Darwin, Bergson argues in Creative Evolution against a mechanistic, reductionist view of evolution. For Bergson, all life emerges from a creative, shared impulse, which he famously terms élan vital and which passes like a current through different organisms and generations over time. Whilst this impulse remains as forms of life diverge and multiply, human life is characterized by a distinctive form of consciousness or intellect. Yet as Bergson brilliantly shows, the intellect’s fragmentary and action- oriented nature, which he likens to the cinematograph, means it alone cannot grasp nature’s creativity and invention over time. A major task of Creative Evolution is to reconcile these two elements. For Bergson, the answer famously lies in intuition, which brings instinct and intellect together and takes us “into the very interior of life.”A work of great rigour and imaginative richness that contributed to Bergson winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, Creative Evolution played an important and controversial role in the trajectory of twentieth-century philosophy and continues to create significant discussion and debate. The philosopher and psychologist William James, who admired Bergson’s work, was writing an introduction to the first English translation of the book before his death in 1910.This new translation includes a foreword by Elizabeth Grosz and a helpful translator’s introduction by Donald Landes. Also translated for the first time are additional notes, articles, reviews and letters on the reception of Creative Evolution in biology, mathematics, and theology. This edition includes fascinating commentaries by philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, and Gilles Deleuze.

First published in 2002. Henri Louis Bergson was born in Paris, October 18, 1859. He entered the Ecole normale in 1878, and was admitted agrégé de philosophie in 1881 and docteur és lettres in 1889. After holding professorships in various provincial and Parisian lycées, he became maître de conférences at the Ecole normale supérieure in 1897, and since 1900 has been professor at the Collége de France. In 1901 he became a member of the Institute on his election to the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques.

Henri Bergson inquires into the nature of moral obligation, into the place of religion and the purpose it has served since primitive times, into static religion and its value in preserving man from the dangers of his own intelligence; into dynamic religion or mysticism as a means of producing man's forward leap beyond the limits of the closed society for which nature intended him and into the open society which is the brotherhood of man.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) verkade från år 1900 som professor vid Collége de France i Paris, och många av tidens tänkare och konstnärer samlades kring honom. I sitt minnestal över Bergson i Franska Akademien sa Paul Valéry: ”Hans stora insats är att han har återupprättat och rehabiliterat känslan och förståelsen för en meditation som ligger vårt väsen närmare än en rent logisk begreppsutveckling.” Introduktion till metafysiken anses vara den skrift där Bergson ger den klaraste framställningen av sin filosofis mål och metod. Denna utgåva är försedd med en utförlig inledning av Asbjørn Aarnes.

For 15 years, Henri Bergson, the most important French philosopher of the early 20th-century, taught at the Collège de France. Speaking without notes, most of his classes are now lost to history, but records of a handful of courses fortuitously survived thanks to stenographic transcripts. Conveying Bergson’s very voice, these extraordinary documents are finally presented here in English.The 1904–1905 lectures are dedicated to the topic of freedom, or as Bergson put it, “the evolution of the problem of freedom.” Building on the philosophy of freedom from his first book, Time and Free Will, he proposes that freedom is not only a fundamental human experience but characteristic of all life as such. By retracing how ancient and modern philosophers have dealt with the delicate question of freedom, Bergson demonstrates the necessity, and also the radically new character, of his own theory of freedom.Bergson’s lectures are a feast for many audiences. For philosophers, they give a fuller picture of his thought and contain deep reflections on many core topics in philosophy today, from the nature of time to the difference between brain and mind, the relation between memory and perception, and the vindication of freedom over determinism. For intellectual historians, the lectures are a treasure trove: as a slice of the living thought of a great thinker; as an extended analysis of the natural and human sciences of his day; and as a rich commentary on the history of ancient and modern philosophy. Finally, for cultural historians and literary scholars, the lectures were the cultural capital of Belle Époque France, consumed by elites and a vast educated public. They are also part of an exceedingly rare genre in modern philosophy: spoken, not written, lectures and expressed as a veritable stream of philosophical consciousness that is remarkably structured and analytically lucid.

The fullest expression of the distinguished French philosopher's ideas about the meaning of life. In propounding his distinctive theory of evolution, Bergson considers nature and intelligence, examines mechanisms of thought and illusion, and presents a criticism of philosophical systems from those of the ancients to those of his 19th-century contemporaries.

Henri Bergson — LaughterGeorge Meredith — An Essay on ComedyIntroduction & Appendix on The Meanings of Comedy by Wylie Sypher     Laughter is a mystery—a mystery which defines man. Brought together in this volume are two classic studies of the nature of laughter and comedy. The great French philosopher Henri Bergson develops, in "Laughter," a profound psychological and philisophic theory of the main springs of comedy—a theory closely related to the doctrine of the élan vital. In his "Essay on Comedy," the English novelist George Meredith discusses the varieties of the comic experience and the social and moral function of comedy.     Together these two major theories go far toward clarifying the mystery of laughter. Wylie Sypher, in his richly documented supplementary essay, places the views of Bergson and Meredith in a large context of speculation on the nature of comedy. The essay reviews important statements of such thinkers as Aristotle, Hobbes, Baudelaire, Freud, Cornford, and others. It serves to give further significance to Bergson and Meredith and to the meaning of comedy itself.

First published in 2002. Henri Louis Bergson was born in Paris, October 18, 1859. He entered the Ecole normale in 1878, and was admitted agrégé de philosophie in 1881 and docteur és lettres in 1889. After holding professorships in various provincial and Parisian lycées, he became maître de conférences at the Ecole normale supérieure in 1897, and since 1900 has been professor at the Collége de France. In 1901 he became a member of the Institute on his election to the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques.

"With its signal distinction between 'intuition' and 'analysis' and its exploration of the different levels of Duration (Bergson's term for Heraclitean flux), An Introduction to Metaphysics has had a significant impact on subsequent twentieth century thought. The arts, from post-impressionist painting to the stream of consciousness novel, and philosophies as diverse as pragmatism, process philosophy, and existentialism bear its imprint. Consigned for a while to the margins of philosophy, Bergson’s thought is making its way back to the mainstream. The reissue of this important work comes at an opportune time, and will be welcomed by teachers and scholars alike." --Peter A. Y. Gunter, University of North Texas