Materie und Gedächtnis

In "Matter and Memory" (1896), his main work, the French philosopher and Nobel Prize winner Henri Bergson discusses the interaction of body and mind in free action. Written at the highest level of thought, but in captivatingly simple language, the work is one of the few outstanding basic texts of contemporary philosophy, comparable "in its time to Berkeley's Principles or Kant's Critique" (William James). Having attempted to place the relationship between freedom and determinism on a new footing in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Bergson here turns to the old philosophical problem of the relationship between mind and matter, in a confrontation with the psychology and brain physiology of his time. In doing so, he neither idealistically reduces matter to pure ideas nor materialistically takes it as their dingl.