Esercizi Filosofici 11, 1 (2016)

Michel Henry, in L’essence de la manifestation, analyses the concept of “feeling oneself” (s'éprouver soi-même in French), rediscovering the concept of immanence as the foundation of transcendence. In this paper, I am going to introduce the phenomenological turn of Michel Henry. The purpose of this article is to explain the Henry’s interpretation of the relationship between Life and World. Consequently, the focus will be to understand what does the view of the world as post-life means, and how it is possible for the language to express the Life.

In a lecture course on Foucault (1986), Deleuze said that he would like, one day, to teach a course on Tarde. As we now know, he did not give such a course. Yet across Deleuze’s books is a fragmentary interpretation of Tarde. Would it be possible to reassemble and identify the guidelines, in retrospect, of what such a course could have been? In our opinion, yes. It could have been developed along three main axes: 1) Tarde as precursor to a philosophy of difference and repetition; 2) Tarde as inventor of microsociology; 3) Tarde as founder of an Echology (or philosophy of “having”) intended to take the place of more traditional Ontology. In this article I propose to deepen, through a direct encounter with the texts, the relevance of these three lines of interpretation.

This essay indicates in the shadow’s phenomenological figure the hermeneutical key to access the ontological concept of game proposed by Fink. In the name of such a figure it is in fact possible to rethink the traditional metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality, trying to see in the first, rather than in the second, the sphere of what is provided with the profile of an authentic presence and subsistence.

The paper analyses Bratman’s planning theory of intention and action, trying to assess its merits in relation to contemporary debates about the constitution of agency. After discussing the limits of the so called belief-desire model in representing the agent’s standpoint, the paper focuses on how planning states can sustain an alternative view based on self-governing strategies allegedly capable of supporting a distinctive sense of personal continuity over time. It ends up with the discussion of some related concerns pertaining to metaphysics and diachronic rationality, in particular the apparent tension between synchronic and diachronic rational pressure over planning deliberation.