Bergson and Time

In Our Time: Philosophy

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2019

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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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0:47.0	Hello Henry Bergson 1859 to 1941 was the most famous philosopher of his time and crowds for his lectures
0:55.7	caused traffic jams in Paris and New York. It was for his ideas about time that
1:01.1	he first made his mark in the 19th century in a book on time and
1:04.7	free will a response to the new idea that science alone could truly predict
1:09.8	human emotions ideas and thoughts in particular he argued that the clock time of technology
1:15.8	is different from the psychological time we experience, where our present is
1:19.9	thickened by our past and our memories and stretches out a long duration not a passing second.
1:26.0	With me to discuss Bergson and time are Emily Thomas, assistant professor in philosophy at Durham University,
1:32.1	Mark Sinclair, reader in philosophy at the University, Marxin-Claire, reader in Philosophy at the University of
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