Esercizi Filosofici 08, 2 (2013)

Following the relationship between subjectivity and knowledge from Empirisme et subjectivité (1953) to Differénce et repetition (1968), this article gives an account of Hume’s influence on the «transcendental empiricism» which is, according to the most part of recent deleuzian studies, the fundamental theoretical spectrum of Deleuze’s thought. The author shows, in this way, how Deleuze methodically reads Hume to create an «heretical» version of Kant’s transcendental philosophy.

This article presents a review of the first course held by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France: La volonté de savoir (1970-1971). The first part of the article rivisits some of the most important themes of the course, while the second part develops extensively the topics and analyzes the relation between Nietzsche's and Foucault's thought, the unnecessary co-implication of knowledge and truth, and the crucial question about the etichal and political role of the philosopher in the contemporary society.

The text would relate Friedrich Nietzsche’s life and work to the italian psychiatric process of reform, carried out in person by Franco Basaglia. From the analysis of Nietzsche’s psychophysical disease and the different medical and psychiatric diagnoses on his person, or even to his thought, this article want to deny the causal link between his disease and its philosophy, saving his thought from the label of delirium: otherwise, it’s important to demonstrate that his philosophy was also his madness and vice versa. As a matter of fact, Foucault explain us that every will of truth on the subjects, such as the same psychiatric diagnosis, is an expression of the power that organizes and administers the bodies: the normalization is the anesthesia of the specific and individual needs. The will of truth of the psychiatric power is immediately connected to the orthopedic domestication of diversity. Thank to Basaglia, instead, psychiatry reached a point of no-return: he put in brackets the disease to focus on the person; made as prior the person and his existence on the institution; fought asylum as an element of chronicity and he is completely disinterested to the pursuit of diagnosis, as factor of exclusion of the subject from the social body. On the basis of these reflections, he dedicated his entire life to the total destruction of the asylum.

This paper deals with the normative dimension of the states of affairs produced by the performance of speech acts (i.e., states of affairs such as commitments, obligations, rights, licenses), and has a twofold aim. First, it points out the inadequacy of Searle’s conventionalist account of both the performance of speech acts and the normativity associated with it, and advocates as an alternative an inferentialist approach along with Bach and Harnish. Second, it suggests that we can account for the normative dimension engendered by speech acts within the inferentialist framework by making the presumption about the interlocutor’s rationality (a notion derived from Grice’s work) fully explicit, and by attending to the set of expectations and constraints that result from it.