Bergson, Henri(1859–1941)
Henri Bergson, the French philosopher of evolution, was born in Paris of Anglo-Polish parentage. During a lifetime of teaching, lecturing, and writing, he gained an international reputation as the author of a new and distinctive philosophical outlook presented in a succession of books whose fluent, nontechnical style gave them a wide appeal. In 1900 Bergson became professor of philosophy at the Collège de France, a post he held until 1921, when ill health obliged him to retire. He received many honors, including election to the French Academy and in 1927 the Nobel Prize for literature. After World War I, Bergson devoted much attention to international affairs, in the hope of promoting peace and cooperation among nations. But World War II had begun and France had been occupied by the armies of Nazi Germany at the time of his death.
Despite the novelty of his outlook, Bergson owed much to his predecessors in the European, and especially in the French, philosophical tradition, primarily to thinkers whose ideas supported his opposition to materialism and mechanism; he was convinced that neither of these doctrines is philosophically tenable. Thus, he was influenced by the idea of Maine de Biran that we sense the "flow" of life as a primary inner experience; by the contentions of Felix Ravaisson that philosophic thought should be focused on the directly intuited, concrete individual, and that mechanism is the external form of an inner spiritual activity; by the contention of Alfred Fouillée that there is an intrinsic freedom in human action; and by the teaching of Émile Boutroux that there exists a radical contingency in nature.
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