32BERGSON, HENRI
creative community. Human beings share
with God’s creative power and are called
by God to be loving co-creators. Human
time spent not in accord with God’s
will is false and unintegrated, whereas
human time spent in accord with God’s
will and nature is eternal. Berdyaev’s
works include The Meaning of History
(1923), The Destiny of Man (1931),
Freedom and the Spirit (1935), Solitude
and Society (1939), Slavery and Freedom
(1940), The Beginning and the End (1947),
The Russian Idea (1949), and Dream and
Reality (1951).
BERGSON, HENRI (1859–1941). French
philosophy professor who influenced
Sartre and Beauvoir. Central to his phi-
losophy is the thesis that the future is
open for God and creatures. He champi-
oned a non-mechanistic understanding
of nature and posited a life-force which
he thought essential in accounting for the
fecundity of life. He further defended
the existence of freedom, creativity, and
the foundational importance of our
experience of time as a matter of duration
rather than as a matter of instants,
measurable as clock time. Bergson saw
temporality as foundational to human
experience. Rather than accept the
Cartesian framework in which subjects
are things that think (je suis une chose qui
pense), he held that subjects are things
that continue (je suis une chose qui dure).
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
- Bergson’s works include Time and
Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate
Given of Awareness (1889), Matter and
Memory (1896), Laughter: An Essay on the
Meaning of the Comic (1900), Creative
Evolution (1907), The Two Sources of
Morality and Religion (1932), and The
Creative Mind (1946).BERKELEY, GEORGE (1685–1753).
An Anglo-Irish philosopher, Berkeley
(pronounced “Barclay”) developed an
idealist philosophy that construed the
natural world in terms of sensations
or ideas, souls, and the mind of God.
Berkeley is famous for his thesis: to be
is to be perceived (Esse est percipi). The
world continues always to exist (even
when we are not immediately sensing it)
because it is constantly being perceived
by God.
Berkeley argued against the distinction
Locke (as well as others like Galileo)
made between primary and secondary
qualities via reduction ad absurdum argu-
ments. Locke thought that primary quali-
ties are mind-independent (e.g., solidity)
whereas secondary qualities (e.g., color) are
not. Berkeley argued that primary quali-
ties are also mind-dependent. Berkeley’s
works include A New Theory of Vision
(1709), Treatise Concerning the Principles
of Human Knowledge (1710), Three
Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
(1713), De Motu (1721), Alciphron (1732),
The Theory of Vision or Visual Language,
Vindicated and Explained (1733), The
Analyst (1734), Siris (1744), The Querist