- Date(s)
- February 9, 2022
- Location
- Online
- Time
- 15:00 - 16:30
- Price
- Free
Yashushi Hirai, University of Fukouka, 'On Bergson's Multi-Scale View of Time'
Nowadays, research in various areas of science is based on a multi-timescale perspective, e.g., brain neural structures, biological clock implementation, biophysics, etc. Beyond these scientific findings, the pluralist view of time should have a crucial philosophical value for our understanding of human nature. Despite this, the monolithic notion of time, that there is a single objective time shared equally by all, persists in people’s common conception of time. The Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Henri Bergson was one of the first in the field of philosophy to propose the idea of the pluralistic coexistence of time. Bergson’s notion of ‘duration’ (durée in French) is generally regarded as advocating the internal experience of time for each individual human being. It is true that each of us experiences time in a different way, and that even the same person may experience time differently at different times (e.g., A child feels the vacation much longer!). The same thing might be said collectively (the films of the 80s have become unwatchably slow-paced!). But all such things were said by Bergson's other contemporaries. What inspired Bergson, and what is most peculiar to his philosophy, is that it is not just that multiple times run in parallel, but that they are layered. Within one and the same person, multiple ‘rhythms of duration’ coexist contemporaneously, and this structure constitutes the condition for the very emergence of our mind and the formation of our personality. In this seminar, I will show, with examples, what the Bergsonian multi-scale picture of time is and how it can be justified.
Contact Suzanne Whitten (suzanne.whitten@qub.ac.uk) for link.
Details of all seminars in 2022 Spring Seminar Series available here
Name | Dr Suzanne Whitten |
suzanne.whitten@qub.ac.uk | |
Website | https://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/happ/ |