French philosopher and metaphysician. Henri Bergson\u2019s concepts of how the human mind works influenced later philosophers and metaphysicians such as Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Jacques Maritain, and William JAMES. Bergson began his teaching career at a school in Clermont-Ferrand in 1883 and in 1900 moved to the College de France, where he continued to teach until he retired in 1921. He served as a diplomat to the United States during World War 1 and worked as head of the League of Nations Committee for Intellectual Cooperation (the precursor to UNESCO) during the 1920s. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1927.<\/p>\n
Bergson\u2019s theories stressed the importance of \u201cexperienced duration\u201d in human history and affairs. Time and Free Will, his 1889 doctoral thesis, set forth the concept that history consists of individual experiences through time that cannot be measured accurately. This idea was in opposition to another major theory of the day that humanity and history were subject to understandable mathematical or mechanical rules. Bergson\u2019s Matter and Memory (1896) and An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) both drew on his concept of \u201cexperienced duration\u201d to suggest ways that human minds and bodies interacted and to stress the importance of intuition understanding how \u201cexperienced duration\u201d works. Bergson\u2019s essentially dualistic philosophy held that man perceives matter through the intellect as divisible and measurable; however, through intuition and memory, time (la duree reelle) is apprehended as indivisible.<\/p>\n
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French philosopher and metaphysician. Henri Bergson\u2019s concepts of how the human mind works influenced later philosophers and metaphysicians such as Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Jacques Maritain, and William JAMES. Bergson began his teaching career at a school in Clermont-Ferrand in 1883 and in 1900 moved to the College de France, where he continued to teach […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-h"],"yoast_head":"\n