Resumo de Time And Free Will

About the Author:Henri-Louis Bergson (October 18, 1859?January 4, 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential in the first half of the 20th century. He was gifted in mathematics, and at an early age won an award for a unique solution to a mathematical problem, as well as a solution to a complex problem that Pascal had claimed to have solved (though he failed to have it published). At the age of eighteen, Bergson attended the École Normale Supérieure for four years, after which he began a career in teaching at Clermont-Ferrand in 1883. In the following year at Clermont-Ferrand, he published a critical study of the philosophy and poetry of Lucretius that has continued to be influential to Classical studies in France to date. Bergson was awarded his doctorate in 1889 for his Essai sur les données immediates de la conscience (Time and Free Will) along with a short Latin thesis. The essay was published the same year by Felix Alcan in his series La Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine.Bergson shifted his focus away from mathematics and mechanics, preferring to develop his thoughts, first presented in Time and Free Will, in the humanities and philosophy, particularly to concepts of the mind, the intuition and the experience of time, or duration.He is led to a theory of mind-body relations, opposing the preference of the separate operations of instinct and intellect. Bergson dedicated Time and Free Will to Jules Lachelier, then public education minister, who was a disciple of Felix Ravaisson and the author of a rather important philosophical work On the Founding of Induction (Du fondement de l'induction, 1871). About the bookBergson in this book argues for a free will by showing that the arguments against the free will come from a confusion of different conceptions of time. As opposed to physicists' idea of measurable time, in human experience life is perceived as a continuous and un measurable flow rather than as a succession of marked-off states of consciousness--something that can be measured not quantitatively, but only qualitatively. I. Bergson?s Starting-Point in Time And Free WillThis section first focuses upon the implications of Bergson?s accounts of the genesis of his foundational insight, and then upon his initial characterization of his starting-point in Time and Free Will.II.Bergson?s Dualism in Time and Free WillThe preceding considerations notwithstanding, it must be granted that Time and Free Will invites interpretation in terms of a dualistic bifurcation of experience and reality. On first reading, at any rate, this work seems to assert that real duration is encountered as a psychological fact, and that, once this fact is acknowledged, nature fragments into the immanent realm of durational consciousness and freedom, on the one hand, and, on the other, into an irreconcilable, ever transcendent domain of spatial matter and determinism:Here, the contrast between inner duration and outer simultaneity appears as an absolute opposition between enduring consciousness and non-durational, perpetually perishing materiality. Numerous passages reinforce this sense of bifurcative opposition. We are repeatedly informed that material things do not endure as doe?s vital consciousness. Other passages, however, attest to the qualified and provisional character of Bergson?s dualistic contrasts.Clearly, few other passages express some dissatisfaction with any radical denial of the durational character of material entities, and with an absolute dichotomization of experience in terms of a durational "inner" sphere and a non-durational "outer" sphere.The doctrine of Time and Free Will, does not constitute a clear-cut bifurcation of nature. Indeed, Bergson?s statements concerning the perception of extensity have far-reaching implicationfor any consideration of durational consciousness in its situated agency, and demand exploration in terms of an acknowledged plurality of centers of action.III. ConclusionsThe character of Bergsondualism is intimately linked with that of his starting-point. Bergson?s operant contrast, homogeneity-heterogeneity, issues in a sustained reflection upon two distinct modes of relatedness whereby experienced diversity is brought to cognitive unity: (1) the abstract, external relatedness of a multiplicity of juxtaposition; and, (2) the real, internal relatedness of a multiplicity of interpenetration. His conclusion is that free will is an observable fact.

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