Metaphysical "Intuition" - Henri Bergson

About this event

How does metaphysics differ from science? What is an "intuitive" understanding of metaphysics? While Kant had dismissed metaphysical intuition as groundless and beyond human knowledge, Henri Bergson sees it as a matter of grasping things “from the inside.” He calls this “intuition”—the kind of understanding we have of our own inner lives. If you try to describe this with concepts or images, you falsify it; you freeze it into position. That’s necessarily what science does, and is very useful, but doesn’t get at what’s metaphysically fundamental for Bergson, which is the unbroken flow of duration.

Today we will discuss Henri Bergson’s An Introduction to Metaphysics (~20 pages):

READING: Here: text or https://web.mit.edu/kaclark/www/bergson_introduction_to_metaphysics.pdf

AUDIO — LibriVox: https://librivox.org/an-introduction-to-metaphysics-by-henri-bergson/

The above description is paraphrased from the PEL podcast. I recommend a listen, since it is helpful: PEL — Bergson / Episode 92 materials: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/tag/henri-bergson/

From The Symposium: Philosophy Community of Chicago