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Almost a 100 years after Bergsondelivered ‘The Possible and the Real’ as a talk at Oxford (1920; published in1934’s La Pensée et le Mouvant/The Creative Mind). Bergson’s conceptionof time, his influence upon 20th century biology, and his views onart were at the center of the seminar ‘Bergson’s Radical Challenge toPhilosophy and the Life Sciences‘, which took place in Trinity College, Oxford,27th of February 2019. Part of a recent re-introduction of Bergson’sthought into the Anglophone theoretical landscape, the event was organized inthe context of the interdisciplinary TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in theHumanities) network ‘Life Itself in Theory and Practice’, which examinescontemporary resonances of the concept of life in philosophy, culture, and the sciences.The three talks in the event invited seminarparticipants to engage in a discussion of new interpretative proposals concerningBergson’s ideas, and to explore their relevance for contemporary debates. Itwas a pleasure to have well-attended, lively, and interested discussion with Oxfordfaculty and students from across the humanities and sciences. Yaron Wolf The Challenges of DurationThe talk provided an introduction toBergson’s works and biography, and developed a sketch of Bergsonian duration inits experiential and metaphysical ramifications, in relation to recent work inthe philosophy of mind. The opening introduced the trajectory of Bergson’s keyworks, from the Essai/Time and Free Will to The Creative Mind, aswell as key biographical details, focusing on the first two decades of the 20thcentury. A discussion of a number of aspects related to the concept of durationfollowed. The first part surveyed Bergson’s critique of the application of spatialcategories to temporal experience, presenting Bergson’s thought experiments andinfluential experiential examples from Time and Free Will. The second partproceeded to outline Bergson’s progression towards an account of the reality oftime, an effort commencing in Matter and Memory. Several contemporarychallenges towards the development of such a view were underlined. Theseinclude, in particular, recent discussions of temporal experience in scholarshipdefending the ‘B-theory’, or ‘block-universe’ view of time. The talk concludedby suggesting ways in which Bergson’s view can potentially address thesechallenges.Emily Herring How Bergson Helped 20th-Century Biologists Get Creative About EvolutionIn the first decades of the 20thcentury, Henri Bergson was an international celebrity. Among Bergson’s widereadership were many biologists including zoologist Julian Huxley (the grandsonof Thomas Huxley, who was also known as “Darwin’s bulldog”), geneticist ArthurDarbishire, and animal behavior scientist Conwy Lloyd Morgan. What can a philosopher like Bergsonteach us about the history of biology? The fact that many 20th-centurybiologists admired Bergson, and integrated his philosophical reflections aboutlife into their scientific theories about life, clashes with the traditionalrepresentation of the 20th century as the era of extreme scientificspecialization and of the definitive separation between science and philosophy.The talk proposed to use the little-studied case of Bergson’s reception amongthe biologists of his time to think about the relationship between science andphilosophy, both in the history of 20th-century biology, and, more generally,in our current state of affairs in which the humanities are often devalued.Bergson will help us think about how scientific knowledge and other forms ofknowledge can be viewed as complementary.Mark Sinclair Bergson on Art, Possibility, and RetroactivityIn a number of occasions, Bergson appealsto experience of the arts, to what is traditionally called ‘fine art’, in orderto support his metaphysical and epistemological claims. Time and Free Willcompares the unity of temporal experience, of real duration to that of a‘phrase in a melody’. Bergson thinks about freedom by analogy with artisticcreation: our acts are free when they “spring from our own personality, whenthey express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it that onesometimes finds between the artist and his work”. Bergson also reflects onintuition as a philosophical method against the background of a certain idea ofartistic intuition and of truth in art. Some of the motivation andjustification for Bergson’s claim that intuition can deliver truths to us—thatconceptual thought, if left to its own devices, can never attain—derived fromideas about the operation of intuition and genius in fine art.Bergson did not develop these appealsto art with a book devoted solely to aesthetics or the philosophy of art.Instead of treating art as an issue apart, Bergson appeals to experience of thearts in order to support metaphysical claims, and to ground truths that resistand transcend conceptual thought. Hence, if Bergson offers a ‘philosophy ofart’, this phrase is to be understood both as an objective genitive, wherebyphilosophy takes art for its object and clarifies it by its own lights, and asa subjective genitive, according to which the philosophy, as an ‘artisticphilosophy’, belongs to the art and is an expression of it. Art, for Bergson,is as much an answer as a question, as much a solution as a problem in its ownright. To understand what Bergson says aboutart, therefore, is to understand not just a particular aspect of his thinkingbut his philosophy as a whole. The talk discussed first his account of the‘object’ or purpose of art in Time and Free Will and Laughter,while the second section turned to the idea of creation and genius in the CreativeEvolution. On this basis, we explored two other aspects of Bergson’s maturemetaphysics that derive from his reflection on artistic creation: the critiqueof the modal category of possibility and his associated account ofretroactivity, the prima facie strange idea of a certain kind ofbackwards causation, in history.