Summary
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 Académie Française. 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.
With
Keith Ansell-Pearson Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick
Emily Thomas Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Durham University
And
Mark Sinclair Reader in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. |
| 0:07.3 | There's a reading list to go with it on our website, |
| 0:09.5 | and you can get news about our programs |
| 0:11.4 | if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. |
| 0:14.7 | I hope you enjoyed the programs. |
| 0:16.7 | Hello, Henry Berkson, 1859 to 1941, |
| 0:20.1 | was the most famous philosopher of his time, |
| 0:23.0 | and crowds for his lectures |
| 0:24.6 | caused traffic jams in Paris and New York. |
| 0:27.8 | It was for his ideas about time, |
| 0:29.8 | that he first made his mark in the 19th century |
| 0:32.0 | in a book on time and free will. |
| 0:34.8 | A response to the new idea that science alone |
| 0:37.7 | could truly predict human emotions, ideas, and thoughts. |
| 0:40.9 | In particular, he argued that the clock time of technology |
| 0:44.7 | is different from the psychological time we experience, |
| 0:48.0 | where our present is thickened by our past, |
| 0:49.8 | and our memories and stretches out, |
| 0:51.8 | a long duration, not a passing second. |
| 0:54.8 | We admit it has got Berkson at Time, our Emily Thomas, |
| 0:58.0 | Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Durham University, |
... |
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