Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson was born in Paris in 1859 to a Polish-Jewish father and an English mother. A brilliant student in both mathematics and philosophy, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure and taught in schools before becoming a professor at the Collège de France in 1900, where his lectures drew enormous crowds. In Time and Free Will (1889) he distinguished measured clock time from duration, the lived flow of inner experience. Matter and Memory (1896), An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) and Creative Evolution (1907), which proposed a vital impulse driving life, made him famous across Europe. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. His last major book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), reflected a deepening sympathy for Christian mysticism. Near the end of his life he wrote that he was drawn to Catholicism but had chosen to remain among the Jews, who were then being persecuted. He died in occupied Paris in January 1941.

Henri Bergson is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Born to Jewish parents; a Jew by birth. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy