ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the notion of subject, substance and personhood in Bergson’s philosophy, from its first major expression in Time and Free Will. The chapter shows how Bergson resists the term ‘subject’ as a name for the durational self, the self or person that is and lives as duration, because the term traditionally names something unchanging that underlies change. Although Bergson preserves the idea of ‘substance’, he does this only in transforming traditional conceptions of it: the substance of the self or person is continual change – and nothing besides. In grappling with the traditional terminology of metaphysics – this chapter also shows – Bergson is in dialogue with Kant, particularly with what the latter presents as the paralogisms of pure reason.
