About the Value of the Ideas of Bergson in the Work of Éduard Le Roy

Abstract

This text precedes the translation into Russian of the E. Le Roy’s work “Une enquête sur quelques traits majeurs de la philosophie bergsonienne” (“On some basic features of the Bergsonian philosophy”). This work is the preface to the issue of the journal “Archives de philosophie” (1947) devoted to the Bergsonian conception. Edouard Le Roy (1870-1954) is a French philosopher and evolutionist, one of the prominent representatives of Catholic modernism; he is а pupil and friend of Bergson, colleague and collaborator of P. Teilhard de Chardin. He has created a special version of the philosophy of the spirit, which is based on the idea of thought-action, i.e. the effective function of thinking. In his conception, Leroy is widely relied on data from paleontology, biology, anthropology, and the theory of evolution. He made a significant contribution to the development of the noosphere theory. The following article not only sets forth the ideas of Bergson, but outlines those directions of their development which Le Roy sought to follow in his own work.