Henri Bergson and philosophical education: memory, duration, and false problems in the teaching of philosophy and educational processes

Abstract

The article examines possible connections between Henri Bergson’s philosophical thought and educational processes, with particular attention to the implications of his philosophy for the teaching of philosophical education, focusing on the concepts of memory, duration, and false problems. The objective is to investigate how these concepts allow for a critical rethinking of pedagogical practices marked by positivist and mechanistic logic. The methodology is bibliographical, grounded in Bergson’s own works and in commentators who have addressed the interface between his philosophy and education. The results indicate that the Bergsonian distinction between habit-memory and recollection-memory questions teaching models founded on repetition and reproduction; that the notion of duration challenges the uniform and timed organization of school time; and that the category of false problems offers a critical tool for identifying inadequate assumptions in contemporary curricular and evaluative arrangements. It is concluded that Bergsonian thought, although it does not constitute a systematic pedagogical theory, offers relevant contributions to forms of teaching more open to the singularity and the becoming of each individual subject, with particularly significant implications for the teaching of philosophy and for philosophical education, fields in which the tension between lived duration and institutional chronometry assumes especially acute contours.