About this book
We are publishing for the first time, after 104 years, in Romanian the work The Concept of Time by Henri Bergson. A critical inquiry (Der Begriff der Zeit bei Henri Bergson. Eine Kritische untersuchung) . This is the inaugural dissertation delivered by Mircea Florian at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Royal University of Greifswald, Germany for obtaining the title of Doctor of Philosophy on March 3, 1914, the coordinating professor being the German immanentist philosopher Johannes Rehmke. Although Mircea Florian had "a long friendship" with Bergsonian philosophy, he criticized Bergson's theory of time as "pure duration". The Romanian philosopher notes that in addition to time which, from a scientific point of view, means the succession of what is given, there is time which is valid only for human consciousness, i.e., a human, historical time, which we can also call duration, to the extent that we simply call the first category time. In other words, the difference is the following: "time has two components: prius (earlier), posterius (later); duration, in a specific sense, however, has three components: past (earlier), present (now) and future (later). Human time (duration) therefore assumes three interconnected components, of which the present is somewhat the place from which a human consciousness looks back and forward". In reality, time does not know tripartition nor Marty's bipartition, but another bipartition first revealed by Aristotle. "Time, as a succession report, assumes two terms: "before" (proteron) and "after" (hysteron)". Mircea Florian does not agree with the distinction made by Bergson, objective time - subjective time. "There is only one time, he said, and this is neither objective nor subjective, it is simply succession. Time is something fundamental, and all attempts to deduce time from something else are self-condemning." Mircea Florian joins the gallery of Romanian philosophers who focused on the problem of time: D. Cantemir, V. Conta, C. Rădulescu-Motru, I. Petrovici, L. Blaga, I. D. Gherea, M. Ralea, I. Biberi, C. Noica. Adrian Michiduţă
