Books by Henri L. Bergson

Henri Bergson was France's preeminent philosopher at the close of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. Showered with awards, honorary doctorates, and prestigious academic positions, Bergson insisted that traditional philosophy was hampered by the constraints of its very systematic approach to understanding the problems of consciousness, relying too heavily on artificially imposed rationality and discounting human intuition as a source of knowledge. In his major philosophical works, such as TIME AND FREE WILL, MATTER AND MEMORY, and CREATIVE EVOLUTION, Bergson blends metaphysics, psychology, physiology, and neuroscience, and continuously refines the essential ideas of his philosophy: the emphasis on memory as the fusion of matter and perception, the sense of a life lived through pure duration (rather than mechanical time), the rejection of "intellectualism" in favor of intuition, and the idea of time as the condition of ceaseless change. By the time Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, his ideas had been so widely disseminated throughout Europe that, paradoxically, at the moment he received this international recognition, his philosophy was beginning to be subsumed by schools of thought, such as existentialism and vitalism, influenced by his work. But "Bergsonism" was revitalized in the 1960s when Gilles Deleuze published the book bearing that title, and in addition to the impact his books continue to have on philosophy, Bergson will be remembered for inspiring philosophers as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Maritain, and Jacques Derrida.