Work · Life & Existential Philosophy
Time and Free Will
Lived duration instead of spatialized time.
Introduction
The book is Bergson’s doctoral thesis, published in Paris in 1889 as Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness); the English title Time and Free Will comes from the translation of 1910. The first chapter argues that the intensity of sensations cannot be measured like a magnitude. The second distinguishes two kinds of multiplicity: the quantitative one of things side by side in space, and the qualitative one of states of consciousness that interpenetrate in duration. The third applies this to the old dispute over determinism: both sides, Bergson argues, treat the self as if it were laid out in space, whereas a free act springs from the whole personality.
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Connections
Criticizes
- Critique of Pure Reason1781 · Immanuel Kant
More works by Henri Bergson
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