biography
| name: |
Bergson, Henri (Louis)
|
pronunciation:
[bergsõ]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1859–1941)
|
| biography:
| Philosopher, born in Paris, France. He became professor at the Collège de France (1900–21), a highly original thinker who became something of a cult figure. He contrasted the fundamental reality of the dynamic flux of consciousness with the inert physical world of discrete objects, which was a convenient fiction for the mechanistic descriptions of science. The élan vital, or ‘creative impulse’, not a deterministic natural selection, is at the heart of evolution; and intuition, not analysis, reveals the real world of process and change. His own writings are literary, suggestive, and analogical rather than philosophical in the modern sense. His most important works are Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889, trans Time and Free Will), Matière et mémoire (1896, Matter and Memory), and L'Evolution créatrice (1907, Creative Evolution). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. |
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