¹ Most critics aim at undermining Strawson's assumption that in order to be morally responsible one must be responsible for one's mental make-up. A libertarian like Randolph Clarke replies to Strawson's argument by saying that the self can freely act in the light of its mental make-up, rather than the decision being one that just is the result of one's mental make-up. See Clarke, Randolph, ‘On an Argument for the Impossibility of Moral Responsibility’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (2005), 13–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We will see that Bergson also questions the legitimacy of the word ‘results’. A good overall assessment of Strawson's critics, and one that concludes that they have not been successful is Istvan, Michael Jr. ‘Concerning the resilience of Galen Strawson's Basic Argument’, Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 155(3) (September 2011), 399–420 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² As far as I can tell, Henri Bergson has had very little influence in recent analytic debates about free will. He is mentioned briefly in a note in Kane, Robert, The Significance of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 231n.7 and in the recent overview of the debate in McKenna, Michael and Pereboom, Derk, Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2016), 232–233 Google Scholar.

³ The division between continental philosophy and analytic philosophy can be understood in many different ways. I take no sides here, but I will remark that Bergson's writings have the clarity that is so prized in analytic philosophy.

⁴ Strawson, Galen, Freedom and Belief (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, Second Edition)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Strawson, Galen, ‘The Bounds of Freedom’ in Kane, Robert (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), 441–460 Google Scholar.

⁶ Ibid., 443.

⁷ To clarify, Strawson is not arguing that determinism rules out the possibility of an agent who is ultimately responsible for her actions. Nor is he arguing that indeterminism rules out that the possibility of an agent who is URD. Strawson does not have to show that some version of incompatibilism is true since he believes the Basic Argument shows that the whole notion of an agent who is ultimately responsible for her actions is incoherent. As McKenna and Pereboom comment, Strawson's argument is far more ambitious than the more mainstream claim that there is incompatibility between moral responsibility and determinism. McKenna, Michael and Pereboom, Derk, Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2016), 151Google Scholar.

⁸ It is no part of Strawson's argument to claim that an agent has to be responsible for every aspect of  his or her decision to act. For a person's actions to occur there has to be oxygen, a sun, he or she needs to have been born…etc. All that Strawson requires is that there be an aspect – even if it just a sliver – that is the crucial tipping point which results in the action. See Istvan, Michael Jr. ‘Concerning the resilience of Galen Strawson's Basic Argument’, Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 155(3) (September 2011), 399–420 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 401–403.

⁹ Quoted by Strawson, , ‘The Bounds of Freedom’ in Kane, Robert (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), 444Google Scholar. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer (Leipzig: Naumann, 1889)Google Scholar. We might note that if the notion of causa sui is so self-contradictory and pernicious to logic, then, ancestors, God, and society do not need any absolving. They, like us, are just so much un-responsible flotsam and jetsam. The only ‘thing’ which we might blame would be chance, which is only a kind of absence – perhaps the absence of a self-originating plan.

¹⁰ Strawson, Galen, ‘The Bounds of Freedom’ in Kane, Robert (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), 444Google Scholar.

¹¹ Ibid., 447.

¹² Ibid., 443

¹³ Ibid., 445.

¹⁴ Bergson, Henri Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness tr. Pogson, F.L. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1910)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ See Ibid., chapter one for his arguments. For the idea of magnitude relying on the notion of containment see 1–3. The notion that one's mental content is not spatial has, of course, a long and venerable history. E.J. Lowe is one modern philosopher who defends this idea. He finds the proposal that thinking about Paris is a physical state difficult, if not impossible to understand. He thinks such physicalist thinking commits one to a kind of category mistake similar to thinking that physical states are identical with the natural numbers. See Lowe, E.J., Personal Agency: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ See, for example, Lacey, A.R., Bergson (Abingdon: Routledge, 1989), 1–16 Google Scholar, and Moore's excellently clear exposition in Moore, F.C.T., Bergson: Thinking Backwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Think, says Moore, of Othello's all-consuming jealousy at the point of thinking that his wife, Desdemona, is having an affair with Michael Cassio. Previous to this he had twinges of jealousy. Do twinges of jealousy increase in number or intensity and become the all-consuming jealousy Othello has at the end of the play? Is the jealousy he has at the end of the play a conglomeration of hundreds of twinges of jealousy, or do we have something else – a different feeling altogether though performing a similar role in explanation? Incidentally, McKenna, Michael and Pereboom, Derk, Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2016), 232–233 Google Scholar, take Bergson's rejection of intensive magnitudes to be his main argument against determinism. They are right that this is part of his rejection of determinism. But I am presenting what I think is his more profound argument, one that claims that both sides of the debate – libertarians as well as determinists – have bought into a mistaken picture of the world.

¹⁷ Bergson, Henri Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness tr. Pogson, F.L.. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1910), 174–175 Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Ibid., 175.

¹⁹ Ibid., 176.

²⁰ Ibid., 179.

²¹ Ibid., 180.

²² Ibid., 181.

²³ At the opening of The Creative Mind tr. Andison, Mabelle L. (New York: Citadel Press, 1946), 11Google Scholar, Bergson argues that what philosophy has lacked most of all is precision. Most debates in philosophy are he claims too wide for the reality we find ourselves in – they could, for example, take place in a world without plants or animals. Being too wide, they fail to meet the specificity of this world, and as such lack precision or match to the reality they purport to explore. As we shall see, it is the same with common philosophical expressions such as t₁. They convey the illusion of precision, but they are actually imprecise since they are too narrow and specific, and so leave too much out.

²⁴ Bergson, Henri Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness tr. Pogson, F.L. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1910), 445Google Scholar.

²⁵ It is hard to see what Strawson means to say when he says that there is a way that you are. Is the ‘way that you are’ an attribute or property of you, and if that is so, are ‘you’ a substance that has the way that you are as a property? Is the way that you are a feature of you? Is it simply you? Is the way that you are the same as your nature? Is it meant to refer to the particular location of all the atoms which compose (?) you? I won't look into these matters since they would take us a long way from Bergson's concerns.

²⁶ Bergson would say that strictly speaking at any point there are no ‘psychological attributes’. To imagine that at a frozen moment in time there are certain psychological attributes is to already have succumbed to an atomist understanding of psychology.

²⁷ Moore, F.C.T. Bergson: Thinking Backwards, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Moore goes on to give another example from Sartre's Sketch of the Emotions tr. Fowler, D.H., (London: Methuen, 1962), 59–60 Google Scholar. Since English and French are alphabetical languages we necessarily write one letter at a particular point in time before we write the next one, but that is not what we are doing. We are writing a word, or trying to put together an argument or in this case writing a footnote for an article. The ways that we can see the ‘task’ are complex and multiple. It is the same with a point in time for our lives. What are we doing is an aspect of something much larger. We do not and cannot live on a razor sharp present.

²⁸ I'm not entirely sure what could be apprehended or individuated in a ‘frozen’ world where the only ‘movement’ which could be attained was one's changing point of view or perspective. Would you even be able to pick out a patch of colour (a football) in such circumstances? Similar questions about the individuation of particulars in different sense modalities are asked, of course, in Strawson's, Peter Individuals (London: Methuen, 1962), esp. 59–86 Google Scholar. Incidentally, Bergson's views about the nature of the material world seemed to change. In Time and Free Will Bergson seems to be committed to the idea that mind is very different from matter – mind is animate and moving, while matter is relatively inert – but in Matter and Memory tr. Paul, Nancy Margaret and Scott, W., (London: Harvester Press 1978)Google Scholar this kind of dualism is rejected. See Barnard, G. William, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson (New York: SUNY Press, 2011), 71 and 121–122 Google Scholar. Even an apparently inanimate, lifeless football is recognised as being full of processes and vortices and vibration.

²⁹ Recall that Strawson adds the qualification ‘in the situation you find yourself’.

³⁰ In Creative Evolution: An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. Andison, Mabelle L., (New York: Citadel Press, 1946), 31Google Scholar, Bergson talks about how in calculus the curve is broken down into smaller and smaller curves which approximate nearer and nearer to straight lines. Indeed, at the limit they are considered identical. But a curve is not actually made up of an infinite quantity of straight lines. Movement is similar. We freeze it and consider that all there is to movement is an infinite collection of stillnesses. But Bergson thinks that the movement is primary. We must not be tempted to think of movement or curves as actually identical to a collection of stillnesses or straight lines even if we introduce the ‘magic’ concept of infinity to allegedly transform the one to the other. Bertrand Russell clashed with Bergson over the nature of continuity. A good overview of the disagreements and disputes between the two on the nature of continuity is given in Pearson's, Keith Ansell Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 24–28 Google Scholar. Basically Bergson disputes whether the continuous (movement for example) can be understood as composed of discrete elements. White's, Michael J. (1992) The Continuous and the Discrete: Ancient Physical Theories from a Contemporary Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is excellent on how the clash of intuitions on the nature of movement can be traced from ancient times.

³¹ Keep in mind that even to say that there is a point O is to think in terms of temporal atoms.

³² Bergson distinguishes between an unfurling which is more or less mechanistic and spatial and an evolution which is the creation of radical novelty. See Hausmann's, Carl A Discourse on Novelty and Creation, (New York: SUNY Press, 1984)Google Scholar for an excellent discussion. He looks at Bergson on 81–84 and in an extended footnote on 140–141.

³³ Creative Evolution: An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. Andison, Mabelle L., (New York: Citadel Press, 1946), 21Google Scholar.

³⁴ In Ontology and Providence in Creation: Taking Nihilo, Ex Seriously (London: Continuum, 2008)Google Scholar I examine and reject the notion that possibility is composed of determinate possible worlds. I defend C.S. Peirce's proposal that possibility is non-determinate and non-discrete.

³⁵ Peirce, C.S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. 5, ed. Hartshorne, Charles and Weiss, Paul. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 459Google Scholar.

³⁶ Bergson's views are, then, in stark and remarkable contrast to someone like McCall's, Storrs A Model of the Universe, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. He proposes a dynamic view of time, but thinks its dynamism is inherent in its elimination of possible paths. The paths we do not venture down cease to be. For McCall, time is elimination of possibility not the creation. Bergson's views on time are very clearly explained in Turetzky, Philip Time, (London: Routledge, 1998), 194–210 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This book has the virtue of examining both analytic and Continental approaches to time.

³⁷ See n. 32.

³⁸ It is more complex than that. Is the past really so definite? Certainly our interpretations of what happens often conflict. I talk about how the past may be something that actually changes in Robson, Mark Ian Thomas, ‘Evolutionary Theodicy, Redemption and Time’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 50(3), September 2015 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ For an influential argument which does say that see Broad, C.D. ‘Determinism, Indeterminism and Libertarianism’, in Ethics and the History of Philosophy, (London: Routledge, 1952), 195–217 Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ See Benson, Bruce Ellis, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for an excellent study of the ways in which music – even those pieces we think of as final and definitive since they are ‘given’ in musical notation – are improvisational.

⁴¹ This ‘whole’ can be seen in various ways. We might understand the music in the context that the whole referred to is the history and development of music in Europe. We might see the whole as church music, protest songs, the development of the ballad, the outpourings of the conflict between the Dionysian and the Apollonian impulses… etc. There are many wholes and each whole transforms the way we will understand the natures of the parts. It is this that atomism denies. Wholes make no difference to the natures of their parts. See Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 82–88 Google Scholar for a wonderfully clear and concise defence of atomism.

⁴² The subtitle to Keith Ansell Pearson's book.

⁴³ Is the idea of self-origination as pernicious to reason and logic as Nietzsche and Strawson suppose? C.D. Broad's Growing Block view of time envisages a world which grows temporally thicker as new slice is added and present moments become more deeply embedded in a growing universe. Past moments do not cease to be, they only find themselves becoming more and more distant from the leading edge of the Growing Block. Here we have a picture of more and more reality coming to be, an accumulation of more reality – from where? At least partly from nothing seems to be the answer. Is this pernicious to reason and logic? Is Broad as mad as Baron Munchhausen? See Robson, Mark Ian Thomas, ‘Evolutionary Theodicy, Redemption and Time’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 50(3), September 2015 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an exploration of the Growing Block view of time.