Bergson on Metaphysics - Partially Exmained Life

Apr 12, 2014, 03:47 AM

On “An Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903)

How does metaphysics differ from science? While Kant had dismissed metaphysics as groundless speculation about things beyond human knowledge, 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.

The regular foursome are joined by Matt Teichman to try to figure out how this proto-phenomenology is supposed to actually amount to metaphysics, like how you can sympathetically have an intuition about anything besides your own experience. #bergson #metaphysics #science #intuition #philosophy Go to the blog: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2014/04/11/ep92-bergson-metaphysics/