Bergson and His Philosophy

Bergson was a radical thinker who insisted that reality is not static matter but perpetual becoming. In an age of mechanistic science, he argued that time cannot be measured like space, that consciousness flows like a river, and that evolution is creative rather than deterministic. This early 20th-century introduction traces Bergson's intellectual journey from his emergence as a brilliant student to his professorship at the Collège de France, examining how his philosophy crystallized through key works like Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution. Gunn illuminates Bergson's central insight: that philosophy must abandon false problems and return to direct intuition of experience. The book captures why Bergson influenced not only philosophy but also physics, literature, and psychology, and why his emphasis on duration, memory, and the élan vital feels strikingly relevant to contemporary debates about consciousness and change.