Talk:Henri Bergson

Mathematical Problem?

The article mentions that HB won an award for solving some math problem but it gives no further details. If they are available they would be interesting especially because it might have some bearing on his standing as something more than a "psychologist" in his debate with Einstein.--Jrm2007 (talk) 20:46, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Nationality, Ethnicity & Religion

In response to the above discussion

• Henri Bergson was born in France to foreign born parents. Since the French Revolution, kids born in France with at least one parent born in France are automatically French citizens. This is what they call Double droit du sol. Furthermore, after living in France for 5 years, any kid is eligible to be naturalized as a French citizen. This is most likely what happened to HB.

• Henri Bergson is clearly of Jewish descent, but without more extensive research, it is hazardous to qualify him as a Polish Jew (most likely Ashkenazi on his father's side) or English Jew (most likely Sephardi on his mother's side). I therefore suggest that we use the more general of Jewish descent to refer to his ancestry in this article.

In response to this Edit and this Reversion :

• Towards the end of his life, out of solidarity with fellow Jews who were persecuted during World War II, Henri Bergson stood by his origins and willingly registered himself as Israélites with the Vichy administration. But according to the well referenced French Wikipedia article about Bergson, he nevertheless might have grown closer to the Catholic Faith than to his ancestral Jewish Faith. I therefore suggest that we remove the French-Jewish Philosopher attribute in the lead and replace it with French Philosopher, moving the ethnic and religious references to the biography section of the article, as customary in WP. X-ode (talk) 06:06, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Early Years - Education and Career...

The sentence originally read:

Education and career

Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes (known as the Lycée Condorcet 1870–1874 and 1883–present) in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had previously received a Jewish religious education, but lost his faith between the ages of 14 and 16. According to Hude (1990), this moral crisis is tied to his discovery of the theory of evolution, according to which humanity shares a common ancestry with modern primates, a process sometimes construed as needing no creative deity.[13]

It felt too creationist in the translation from the french - since evolution is the process that assumes life evolved from natural selection and humans from primates without any creative deity - having the "sometimes' in there misconstrues evolution as a process that presumes creative deity as an explanation.

I tracked down the reference

and here is the exact wording to which the reference alludes in its original form for comparison.

"Hude affirme que Bergson a très tôt adhéré à l'évolutionnisme, tout en

conservant à l'arrière-plan la conviction judéo-chrétienne de l'existence d'un Dieu créateur."

I do not know how to update the reference but I would like it to point directly to the talk and the source document instead of to the general Academie francaise website with the date of the lecture quoted.

here are the links - I do not know how to do this yet.

https://www.college-de-france.fr/sites/default/files/documents/anne-fagot-largeault/UPL8477009210450237471_2006_12_21_docu_corr.pdf

https://www.college-de-france.fr/en/agenda/lecture/ontology-of-becoming-1/the-evolution-of-living-beings-continuous-creation-of-unpredictable-novelty-bergson

I will also improve upon the wording "construed" which alludes to a skewed or fabricated thing in a pejorative way. I understand the idea that needs to be conveyed is that Bergson agreed with evolution as a mecanism but retained some from or agnostic belief or gnostic belief in the background or as a basis of his thinking. Vincentioccam (talk) 16:00, 13 February 2025 (UTC)