Biography of Henri Bergson

Father of Intuitionism

18 October 1859 4 April 1941 the euphoria determined by scientific progress brings to life, in the mid-1800s, to a school of thought which rejects almost with disdain all forms of romance, of that tendency, that is, to read the metaphysical and spiritual reality from assumptions. This immense trust in science, that seems to promise the revelation of every mystery based on exclusively by natural laws, through IE observation, hypothesis and its experimental verification, is called "positivism". But already at the end of the century, this cultural trend is in crisis: the philosophy back to reconsider the romance through various movements of ideas, but on all prevails what will be called the father of intuitionism, Frenchman Henri Bergson. Born in Paris to Jewish parents of Irish descent on 18 October 1859, Henri-Louis Bergson attended the high school "Condorcet" then undertake studies in mathematics and philosophy at Normal in Paris. Since his youth he tends to hold separate reality and science, ravvedendo especially in spirituality an interpretation of life and the world around them. In recent years knows Jean Jaurès and Maurice Blondel. In 1889 he started the publications with the thesis for his doctorate in philosophy "essay on the immediate data of consciousness", destined to become, arguably, the most important of his works; continues with "matter and memory", in 1896 and "creative evolution" in 1907. In these writings is also addictive, especially the great Marcel Proust, writer Charles Péguy and the American philosopher William James. Completed studies devoted himself to teaching in high schools of Angers and Clermont-Ferrand, to go into those Parisians "Rollin" and "Henry IV". In 1891, he married the 32-year-old, 19-year-old Louise Neuburger, cousin of the same Proust. Bergson arrives then, in 1900, at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Paris as "maitre de conférences" and teaches Greek philosophy and modern at the College of France; at this stage he attended cultural environments of the capital by being known and appreciated for the originality of thought much to become soon a major landmark. Each Conference rushes all the Paris intellectual. In 1914 France and academic recognition, gets four years later, is elected President of the "Committee on intellectual cooperation", which belongs to the League of Nations. In 1927 Henri Bergson is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1932 he published "the two sources of morality and religion", and the following year it was the turn of "the thought and the motive". When the Germans occupy Paris in June 1940, Bergson refuses the treatment that is offered to stay consistent with your own ideas and to share the same fate of his people; for the same reason, when you approach to Catholicism, avoids the official conversion to "remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted". About Catholicism, he writes in his will written in 1937 that is "the complete fulfillment of Judaism"; and provides that at his funeral there is a Catholic priest. Henri Bergson shuts down to respiratory failure in Paris on January 4, 1941, at the age of 82 years. Bergson's spiritualism States especially in the period between the two world wars, drawing herself up a bulwark against rationalism, intellectualism and scientism which he opposes the empirical value of intuition. In particular, he alleges that the rationalization of the concept of time that science would claim to operate regardless of his close association with human consciousness. Bergson is the promoter of a system based on intuition. His philosophy rises to the rank of philosophical movement known as, "not exclude that," that has pervaded not only philosophical but cultural sphere more generally, influencing art, poetry, social life and theology. There are about thirty works he published, among which we remember, in addition to those already mentioned: "rice, an essay on the meaning of the comic", 1900; "The philosophy of intuition: introduction to metaphysics", 1903; "The énergie Faerie swarm", 1919; "Durée et Simultanéité", 1922; "La Pensée et le Mouvant," 1935.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.