Of Jewish descent, Bergson was educated at the Ecole Normale Superieure. He taught philosophy at a variety of schools from 1881 to 1897. In 1889, he published Time and Free Will. In 1900, he became a professor at the College de France where his lectures were among the most popular at the school. In 1914, he began serving on French diplomatic missions until 1921 when he resigned to spend more time on his writing. From 1921 to 1926, he was the president of the committee of international cooperation of the League of Nations. In 1927, Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1940, the Vichy government offered to exclude Bergson from their anti-Semitic laws, but Bergson refused and registered himself as a Jew at the end of 1940. Bergson was spared the Holocaust by his death from bronchitis in early 1941. Bergson's work includes Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), Creative Evolution (1907), Mind-Energy (1919) and The Creative Mind (1934). |
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