Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was a French philosopher, born in Paris to a Polish-Jewish father and an English mother. Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), Laughter (1900) and Creative Evolution (1907) made him the most celebrated philosopher of the early twentieth century; and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. His central ideas were duration, time as lived rather than measured, and intuition as a way of knowing that the analytic intellect cannot reach. Drawn to Catholicism late in life, he refused to abandon his Jewish identity under the Occupation and died in Paris in January 1941.