Back to Duration and simultaneity

Abstract

Like a sort of throwback, every anniversary brings together an event from the past with the present. One hundred years after its publication, Bergson's book Duration and Simultaneity constitutes a remarkable example of this through the oppositions contained and which broke out during the meeting with Einstein, on April 6, 1922. On the side of philosophy, Bergson developed the astonishment experienced during from the Bologna Congress eleven years earlier, Langevin's presentation announcing the famous "paradox of the twins"; a development that brought him back to his analysis of Newtonian physics and Kantian philosophy, the multiplicity of true time or duration, distinguished in 1889 from spatial multiplicity and its number. However, on the side of research carried out by physicists at the turn of the 20th century, Einstein's 1905 article operated the return, on Newton's shoulders, to Galileo and his dialogue with Aristotle. The dialogue form chosen here strives to reactivate the still living paradox that constitutes Bergson's return to his starting point. Much more than a book from the past, it is an event that has never ceased to combine physics and philosophy, and which today calls us to a dialogue