Bergson after Boutroux on freedom and contingency

Henri Bergson seldom refers to Emile Boutroux directly, and for this reason his relation to his teacher has often been neglected. On the basis of some of Bergson’s remarks about contingency in his recently published 1904–05 lecture course on the Evolution of the Problem of Freedom, this chapter shows how his whole philosophical career develops the ideas of Boutroux’s 1874 On the Contingency of Laws of Nature. The first part of the chapter concentrates in particular on how Bergson’s notion of free will in the third chapter of his primary doctoral dissertation develops Boutroux’s ideas about contingency in the psychological domain. The second part of the chapter focuses on Boutroux’s account of contingency in the natural world and shows that Bergson is more reluctant than his teacher to reject the truth of mechanistic philosophy and to adopt entirely a philosophy of contingency.