Henri Bergson

Henri-Louis Bergson (18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was one of the most influential French philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature, Bergson argued that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism for understanding reality and human consciousness.

In landmark works such as Creative Evolution (1907) and Time and Free Will (1889), he introduced the concept of élan vital (vital impulse) and distinguished between mathematical clock time and lived duration (durée).