Henri Bergson

Born in Paris on October 18, 1859, Henri Bergson became one of the most widely read and discussed philosophers of his era. He taught in France, including at the Collège de France, and was known for arguing that lived experience, movement, and change matter more than rigid, static systems when we try to understand reality.

His major books include Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution, and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Readers were drawn not only to his ideas about time, consciousness, memory, and intuition, but also to the energy and elegance of his prose.

Bergson was elected to the Académie française and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 for the richness of his ideas and the brilliance of their expression. He died in Paris on January 4, 1941, but his work continued to shape philosophy, literature, psychology, and modern debates about how we experience time.