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.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

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

Related episodes

Programme ID: m0004s9w

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004s9w

Auto-category: 115 (Philosophy of Time)