Lectures at the Collège de France

Overview

With Nils Schott, I am preparing English editions of three lecture courses Henri Bergson gave at the Collège de France: The Evolution of the Problem of Freedom: Lectures at the Collège de France 1904-1905 (Bloomsbury, 2024), The History of the Idea of Time: Lectures at the Collège de France 1902-1903 (Bloomsbury, 2025), and The History of Theories of Memory: Lectures at the Collège de France 1903-1904 (Bloomsbury, 2026). 

Bergson lectured at the Collège from 1900-1914, yet only four of his courses have been preserved. The fact that we have any at all is extraordinary because he lectured without notes. Transcripts exist only because one of his auditors (the poet Charles Péguy) was so dedicated that, for the years Péguy was unable to attend in person, he hired stenographers to provide him with an exact record. These transcripts were discovered in 1997 and only recently published by Presses universitaires de France. 

Bergson’s lectures will interest many audiences. For philosophers, they give a fuller picture of his thought. So often, Bergson uses the lectures to recapitulate ideas from his published works, as well as to prepare the ground for those ahead. His lectures also contain deep reflections on many core topics in philosophy today, from the nature of time, to the difference between brain and mind, the relation between memory and perception, and the vindication of freedom over determinism. For intellectual historians, the lectures are a feast: as a slice of the living thought of a great thinker; as an extended analysis of the natural sciences of his day (including psychology, biology, and physics); and as a rich commentary on the history of ancient and modern philosophy (something Bergson rarely does in his published oeuvre). Finally, for cultural historians and literary scholars, the lectures are an artefact of Belle Époque France. They were the cultural capital of the day, consumed by elites and a wider public. They are also part of an exceedingly rare genre in modern philosophy: spoken, not written, lectures and expressed as a veritable stream of philosophical consciousness that is remarkably structured and analytically lucid.

You can read the series preface and editors’s introduction to Freedom here.