Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson was the most famous philosopher in the world in the years before the First World War, lecturing to crowds at the Collège de France and winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Against the mechanical picture of time as a series of instants he set duration, the time we actually live, and against materialism the élan vital of Creative Evolution. Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory are the technical works; the Introduction to Metaphysics is the shortest way in. Born Jewish, he refused exemption from the Vichy race laws and died registering as a Jew in 1941.