Calvin McCafferty’s Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate over the Nature of Time is one of the 14 pieces that comprises the Senior Essay Edition of The Yale Historical Review.

1. Senior Thesis Edition
EINSTEIN, BERGSON,
AND THE DEBATE OVER
THE NATURE OF TIME
by Calvin McCafferty, '20
Written for “The Senior Essay”
Advised by Marci Shore
Edited by Marcus McKee, '22
On the 6th of April, 1922, Albert Einstein was invited to the Société Française de Philosophie in Paris to
present his recently-developed theory of relativity to an audience of French academics, notably in atten-
dance was the French philosopher Henri Bergson. In Bergson’s philosophy, time is not linear and divisible
in the way we normally conceive of it. Time, in Bergson’s view, has duration (durée in French) and is not
something that can be divided into discrete units. Moreover, Bergson believed that time as duration is
universal; there is a single flow of time which we all inhabit.
Einstein gave his lecture on the theory of relativity, which posits that due to the relative nature of time,
there can exist multiple ‘real’ times. After several mathematicians and physicists made comments lauding
his work, Bergson stood to speak. Not completely discounting Einstein’s work, Bergson gently pushed
back against the results yielded from Einstein’s theory. While Bergson believed that Einstein’s math was
correct, he doubted the validity of the results as they bore on reality. He ended his response advocating
for the two disciplines of philosophy and mathematics to work together to search for the truth. Einstein’s
response was brief; in a few words he claimed that Bergson had misunderstood his theory. Einstein ended
by saying, “the time of the philosophers does not exist.”
This encounter has been framed as a great debate between the humanities and science, as Einstein’s theory
directly challenged the core tenets of contemporary philosophical thought. While the dispute was porten-
tous of a rift between the two fields, with lasting ripples that can still be felt nearly a century later, the
debate itself was far less momentous than the life it took on.
ABSTRACT
1YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW