Bergson and Time

9 May, 2019 110 Metaphysics

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and his ideas about human experience of time passing and how that differs from a scientific measurement of time, set out in his thesis on ‘Time and Free Will’ in 1889. He became famous in France and abroad for decades, rivalled only by Einstein and, in the years after the Dreyfus Affair, was the first ever Jewish member of the Academie Francaise. It’s thought his work influenced Proust and Woolf, and the Cubists. He died in 1941 from a cold which, reputedly, he caught while queuing to register as a Jew, refusing the Vichy government’s offer of exemption.

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Guests

  • Keith Ansell-Pearson 2 episodes
    Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick
  • Emily Thomas No other episodes
    Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Durham University
  • Mark Sinclair No other episodes
    Reader in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton

Reading list

  • Keith Ansell-Pearson at the University of Warwick
  • Emily Thomas at Durham University
  • Mark Sinclair at the University of Roehampton
  • Time and Free Will
    Henri Bergson (trans. F. L. Pogson) (George Allen and Unwin, 1910)
  • Bergson on the Time of Memory
    Keith Ansell-Pearson
  • Henri Bergson - Wikipedia
  • Bergson and the Time of Life
    Keith Ansell-Pearson (Routledge, 2002)
  • Bergson; Thinking Beyond the Human Condition
    Keith Ansell-Pearson (Bloomsbury Press, 2018)
  • Key Writings
    Henri Bergson (ed. K. Ansell-Pearson and J. Mullarkey) (Bloomsbury, 2014)
  • Time and Free Will
    Henri Bergson (Adamant Media Corporation, 2000)
  • Matter and Memory
    Henri Bergson (Martino Fine Books, 2011)
  • Creative Evolution
    Henri Bergson (Dover Press, 2003)
  • The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
    Henri Bergson (Andesite Press, 2017)
  • The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time
    Jimena Canales (Princeton University Press, 2015)
  • Life Lessons from Bergson
    Michael Foley (Macmillan, 2013)
  • Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson
    Suzanne Guerlac (Cornell University Press, 2006)
  • Bergson and his Critique of Intellectualism
    William James (Kessinger Publishing, 2010)
  • Henri Bergson
    Vladimir Jankelevitch (Duke University Press, 2015)
  • Bergson
    Lezek Kolakowski (Oxford University Press, 1985)
  • Powers of Time: Versions of Bergson
    David Lapoujade (University of Minnesota Press, 2018)
  • The Origin of Time: Heidegger and Bergson
    Heath Massey (State University of New York Press, 2015)
  • Bergson and American Culture
    Tom Quirk (University of North Carolina Press, 1990)
  • Bergson
    Mark Sinclair (Routledge, forthcoming Sept 2019)
  • Of Time and Lamentation
    Raymond Tallis (Agenda Publishing, 2017)
  • Moments of Being
    Virginia Woolf (Pimlico, 2002)

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Programme ID: m0004s9w

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Auto-category: 115 (Philosophy of Time)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello, Henry Bergson, 1859 to 1941, was the most famous philosopher of his time and crowds for his lectures caused traffic jams in Paris and New York.