It is very hard to read philosophy in this phenomenological/continental tradition. There is a real resistance in that tradition to plainly stating a core thesis. There may well be defensible reasons for this - maybe it preserves the subtleties, peculiar texture; the holistic, or even contradictory nature of thought or consciousness or what have you. But I think a lot of the time these philosophers won't come right out and say what they mean because they don't really know what they mean, and any sufficiently plain statement of their views would reveal itself as either trivially correct, or obviously wrong. Here is an example:
> Bergson seems to argue that even Einstein’s concept of time, as what’s measured by a clock, is based on some more fundamental, more real, non-mathematical view of time, time as we perceive it, which might defy exact mathematical expression. What sense of time does Bergson have in mind here?
> Consider, for example, how different pre-modern notions of time are from ours. When I write about the history of time in contemporary times, I always have in the back of my mind the image of Saturn devouring his son. In it, the passage, keeping and telling of time occurs be reference to love, violence, anthropophagy and reproduction. Throughout time, it is clear that we are dealing with radically different beasts. Bergson did not draw such stark distinctions, but in Duration and Simultaneity he asked us not to forget how time was a precondition for effective action. “Le temps est pour moi ce qu'il y a de plus réel et de plus nécessaire ; c'est la condition fondamentale de l'action ; – que dis-je ? c'est l'action même.”
> Einstein’s definition of time has none of these radical elements and might even be responsible for leading us to forget about them.
This question gets at the heart of the matter: what exactly is the disagreement between Bergson and Einstein? And we get a non-answer as far as I can tell. I have no idea what "radical elements" she is referencing. There some notion about ideas like "violence" or "reproduction" being stand-ins for the concept of time? and something about time being a precondition for, or even identical to, action? Violence and reproduction and action per se all take a non-zero amount of clock time, so I don't what the conflict is here.
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Ok, enough rambling. If anyone has a reaction similar to mine, they might find a more relatable exploration of this subject in Wilfrid Sellars' concepts of the the (naive, common-sensical, person-centric) "manifest image" and the "scientific image", and the role of philosophy in reconciling them.