The encounter between Bergson and Einstein that took place at the 1922 meeting of the Philosophical Society at the Collège de France gave rise to a lively debate about the relative merits of Bergson’s contribution to the understanding of time in relativity. In this paper, I argue that despite some serious shortcomings, Bergson’s philosophical intervention in the interpretation of relativity makes a novel and valuable contribution to the understanding of time in relativity. With reference to the so-called ‘paradox’ of the (...) twins, I begin by arguing that Bergson offers a corrective for the fallacious view that temporal passage is illusory. In the second section, I explain what Bergson means by a single, universal time. Given the fact that in relativity there is a plurality of times, this idea seems inconsistent with relativity, but I argue that Bergson’s single time is just duration, a time that is dependent on the temporal passage in a particular inertial frame. In a third section, I show that despite his failure to see it, Bergsonian duration is actually consistent with proper time, a time that is invariant regardless of which frame is used to perform the calculation. Once we make this connection between duration and proper time, we can see what Bergson’s intervention is really meant to accomplish; namely, to attach a concrete sense of the passage of time to relativity, thus ‘completing’ the theory of relativity so that it can account for the duration that we all feel and know with inimitable intimacy. In the end, my position is that Bergson helps us to see that time lapse is what it is not because it is measured as such, but rather because it is the lived time of a particular process that is invariant to change of inertial frame. (shrink)

This chapter draws on Schelling's insights about evil to show that the reason we find Ender's Game so disturbing is that it points to unnerving facts about our own lives. One thing that Schelling can help us to notice is that by becoming a selfish monster, Ender passes through an essential phase in his moral development. Card's Ender's Game is disturbing not only because of what its protagonist does and the manipulation that led him to it. It's discomfiting because it (...) points to something all suspect about us: that our freedom is really a product of forces that can't detect or even imagine. Ender's Game is thus revealed as a meditation on the interplay of freedom and fate that defines all of our lives. (shrink)