Abstract
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was one of the main exponents of evolutionary thinking in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century. He gave that kind of thinking an unprecedented metaphysical turn. In consequence of his versatility, he also encountered the notion of truth-making, which he connected with his ever-present concerns about time and duration. Eager to stress the dimension of radical change and of novelty in the nature of things, he rejected (in one form) what he called “the retrograde movement of the true” while championing it—with undeniable delight in the air of paradox—in a derivative form. In this chapter, I explain what “the retrograde movement of the true” consists of—in its two forms.
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Notes
- 1.
My interest in the topic of this chapter originated with a mention of Bergson’s view on “retrogradation of truth” by Vuillemin (1996, p. 148–149).
- 2.
Ironically enough, the main treatment of these questions was elaborated by Bergson for his English lectures at Columbia University (New York) in 1913 (see Bergson 1959a, p. 1264, note 1). The lectures have not been recovered to this day.
- 3.
Quite in tune with other philosophers of the early twentieth century —one thinks of R. Carnap’s Scheinprobleme (1928)—Bergson holds that many questions taken to be important in philosophy are merely consequences of defective assumptions. The usual view of possibility involves such assumptions.
- 4.
Of course, epistemic restrictions to foreknowledge can be philosophically sophisticated as Karl Popper’s example shows (1960).
References
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Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Colin Geddes (Edinburgh) for his precious help with the preparation of the English version of this chapter.
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Schulthess, D. (2014). Bergson, Truth-making, and the Retrograde Movement of the True. In: Reboul, A. (eds) Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04199-5_33
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