Christian Frigerio

Mimesis 2023.
Il concetto di relazione è oggi un protagonista dei dibattiti metafisici, ma solo da poco la filosofia ha iniziato a prenderlo sul serio. Il saggio rappresenta la prima indagine estesa sul macro-evento filosofico che ha portato la relazione al centro dell’attenzione: il dibattito sulle relazioni interne ed esterne. Dopo averne rintracciata l’origine nell’intricato scontro dei primi anni del Novecento tra Francis Herbert Bradley e Bertrand Russell, esso segue gli sviluppi del dibattito in Ludwig Wittgenstein e Alfred North Whitehead, in Charles Sanders Peirce e William James, ne studia le riprese da parte di Jean Wahl e Gilles Deleuze, esplorandone infine le propaggini contemporanee in Bruno Latour e tra gli esponenti del realismo speculativo. Chiedersi se le relazioni siano interne o esterne significa porsi due domande legate ma distinte: le relazioni sono ontologicamente fondamentali o sono riducibili ai propri termini? Questi hanno un’esistenza e un’identità indipendente dalle relazioni o sono da queste definiti nella loro essenza più intima? All’intersezione di questi due interrogativi emergerà una concezione del mondo che vede affermato fino in fondo il ruolo ontologico delle relazioni quali agenti attivi del divenire e della sua complessità.

Cosmos and History, vol. 20, no. 1, 2024, 96-132.
The concept of "mode of existence" has recently experienced a great diffusion in both continental and analytic philosophy. However, philosophers tend to use it without paying much attention to its theoretical implications. This paper proposes to establish a branch of ontology
entirely devoted to clarifying the use of the concept of mode of existence. We will begin by showing how Husserl's framework for addressing the heterogeneity of being, based on the distinction between material
and formal ontology, participates in two ideas that have defined the tradition of the univocity of being in Western philosophy: the decision in favor of identity in the "ontological tension" between conceiving of being in terms of identity or in terms of difference, left as a legacy of Aristotle's
Metaphysics; and the correlative processes of the "logicization of being" and the "essentialization of existence", that allowed Duns Scotus to proclaim that the concept of being is univocal. Then, we follow Roman Ingarden in claiming that "existential ontology" should be added to Husserl's bifurcation of formal and material ontology: existential ontology is a formal inquiry into the very meaning of there being modes of existence, which, unlike Husserl's formal ontology, does not subject all existence to the mode of logic. The main features of existential ontology are outlined, and some of the questions it must face are mentioned. Finally, an example of how it should work is given by addressing the question of the "existential difference" between being and existence. The idea of existential ontology that should emerge is that of a discipline that provides a "diplomatic" framework in which different understandings of modes of existence can be
confronted and debated.

in J.A. Florez (ed.), Peirce y el mundo clasico (Cuadernos de Sistematica Peirceana), Universidad de Caldas, 2024, pp. 59-94.
The paper studies Peirce's reading of Plato's Sophist and suggests that many traits of Peirce's philosophy, including his "dynamical" (rather than "somatic") view of general ideas, his relational (rather than substantialist) metaphysics, and his logic of relatives (as distingushed from classical subject-predicate logic) can be framed as legacies of Plato's late dialogue. The paper also shows how some problematic traits of Plato's understanding of ideas, such as its weakness to the third man argument, can be amended through Peirce's synechism.

Giornale di Metafisica 45(1), 2023, pp. 149-162.
This paper frames Whitehead’s speculative scheme as an answer to the epistemological problems of his time, when the debate around Hegelianism – that is, mainly, the clash between monism and pluralism on the one hand, idealism and realism on the other – set the agenda of many Anglo-Saxon philosophers. Whitehead tries to accommodate the claims of the defenders of epistemological Hegelianism (that is, the position according to which a judgment can be true only when it is part of a whole truth system) through the internal relatedness of the actual world, as is apparent from his treatment of laws of nature as concrete universals; the pretenses of anti-Hegelians are instead accommodated through the mutual exteriority of eternal objects, which allows for a finite analysis of some universal truths. This double articulation of knowledge accounts on the one hand for the analytical nature of mathematical propositions, on the other for the synthetic and inferential character of predictive sciences, finding an alternative to both skepticism and absolute knowledge and grounding speculation in the concrete practice of knowledge.

InCircolo, n. 15, 2023, pp. 51-71.
In his newly published Harvard Lectures, Whitehead describes his approach as an «organic empiricism». This paper will account for this definition, framing it as the overcoming of two dogmas of Humean empiricism: the ideas that practice must always remain alien to philosophical speculation, and that relations are never given in experience. Both these tenets were famously challenged by William James with his «pragmatism» and «radical empiricism»; Whitehead's organic empiricism can be understood as a combination of a form of pragmatism with a form of radical empiricism, which frames both within an accomplished metaphysical scheme. Making a crucial use of the newly published notes from the Harvard Lectures, the paper will focus, first, on the way Whitehead includes considerations taken from practice in philosophy, and second, on the way this brings him to insist on the presence and relevance of «internal relations» in the metaphysical structure of the world and in our experience of it. A final comparison with James shall highlight the originality of this proposal and its explanatory power.

"Acme", v. 75, n. 1, 2022, pp. 175-190.
Questo articolo si propone come contributo alla teoria della rêverie degli elementi naturali sviluppata da Gaston Bachelard. Si argomenterà che la contemplazione del mare sollecita una visione particolare del mondo che può affettare le nostre idee del tempo e della memoria. Sulla scia del famoso detto di Eraclito, quella del fiume è sempre stata l'immagine principale per descrivere la natura inafferrabile del tempo; ma il mare, il luogo dove finiscono tutti i fiumi, fornisce una perfetta analogia naturale per la conservazione del «passato in sé» attorno cui Henri Bergson ha costruito la sua teoria della durata e della memoria: niente scompare davvero, e così il passato viene dotato della consistenza e della vivida eternità che la filosofia tradizionale attribuiva all'essere. Intercessori dal panorama letterario, uniti alla considerazione filosofica di alcune immagini ricorrenti - specialmente quelle del relitto e della città sommersa - aiuteranno ad approssimare la rêverie marina al pensiero di Bergson, approssimazione che si compirà nella conclusione.

Cosmos & History 28(2), 2022, pp. 228-250.
Josiah Royce is remembered mainly as an absolute idealist. Through his confrontation with "Bradley's regress", this paper will show that he was actually trying to combine a bold form of monism with a pluralism of real, discrete individuals. His commitment to the actual infinite is used both to turn Bradley's regress into the generative mechanism of individuality within the Absolute, and to abolish the ontological difference between the Absolute itself and the individuals it contains. The "flat absolutism" resulting from this operation will be compared to the contemporary "flat ontologies" of Manuel DeLanda and Graham Harman, whose pluralism and commitment to "external" relations are shown to be just some of the ways in which a robust sense of individuality can be defended.

Syzetesis, n. 9, 2022, pp. 7-28.
The debate over internal and external relations was the first
attempt in the history of Western thought to use the concept of relation to
undermine the metaphysical throne of substance. One hundred and thirty
years later, the debate is livelier than ever, both in its continental and analytic
branches. This paper offers a conceptual groundwork for the reconstruction
of the debate, focalizing on the insufficiency of the Manichean vocabulary
of internal and external relations, and offering in its place a richer and more
consistent taxonomy of models of relationality. This is done genealogically,
through a critical examination of the way Russell posed the terms of the
debate in his discussion of Leibniz: Russell’s fallacious arguments are not
amended by those who follow him, causing a growing confusion in the terms
of the debate. This reconstructive work offers five different models of relationality – supervenient, external, constitutive, vicarious and structural relations – as a first attempt to a clearer conceptualization of the debate, hoping
that this new vocabulary can also create a common ground of commensurability for a renewed dialogue between the continental and analytic debate.

Areté 7, 2022, 543-564.
Western philosophy and common sense have long been marked by "passivism", a view of nature as devoid of any intrinsic power. Passivism has justified the worst human attitudes towards nature, which have brought to the ongoing ecological crisis. Today, powers ontology offers an alternative to passivism: every natural entity is characterized by a relational capacity to produce and receive affects. This paper will argue that powers ontology can be turned directly into a theory of values that obliges us to care about every entity in the world: the reality of active and passive powers entails the possibility of reading them as normative indications that require to be attended to. Rather than building an accomplished moral system on this basis, the paper will lay down some claims that could act as a frame for different theories that share the request for an immanent source for values. After an historical contextualization of the concept of power, the second section explains how powers can be read as normative indications prescribing a charitable attitude. The third section will use Alphonso Lingis' phenomenology of perception to show that powers (and hence values) are not an intellectual or emotional superstructure but constitute the frame of immediate experience itself, while the fourth section sketches, through Whitehead's philosophy of the organism, the kind of relationality (neither holism nor mere individualism) required by powers ontology. The fifth section faces the difficult problem of the performative objectivity of this theory of values, and the conclusion treats the somehow aporetic upshot of powers axiology as a kind of "tragic ecology".

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, XIV-2 | 2022
This paper aims at exploring a particular dimension of the affinity between Gilles Deleuze and pragmatism: his ontology of the virtual, which results in a metaphysics of power. In Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, the essence of an entity is identical to its power: what can it do? substitutes the Socratic ti esti? as the leading philosophical question. This shift, operated by Spinoza and given a new and adequate ontology by Deleuze, is very close to Peirce’s pragmatic revolution: if Deleuze’s virtual ideas are identical to the range of variations in power and affects that a body may go through, Peirce defines meaning in terms of the whole range of possible effects that an idea would produce if taken to be true. Contradictory as it may sound, the concept of the virtual entails something like a pragmaticism of the singular, which informs every aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy: his doctrine of faculties and his theory of praxis will be used as instances of this pervasiveness. This pragmatist reading of Deleuze could possibly shape an alternative path for contemporary pragmatism: instead of valorising its “edifying” (linguistic, historicistic, humanistic) tendency, Deleuze allows to highlight the vitality of the second vein of pragmatism, the “constructive,” empiricist, speculative, even metaphysical one.

Etica & Politica, n. 23, vol. 3, 2021, pp. 403-423.
http://www2.units.it/etica/
This paper aims at showing the consequences of Bruno Latour's endorsement of the anti-holist, "flat" ontology (an ontology that denies that difference in scale is an ontological difference) shared by many speculative realists. While this assumption presents notorious problems on the political side, it will be shown to have explicative and pragmatic potential when it comes to political ecology. After exploring his treatment of the concept of scale, which draws on Gabriel Tarde's monadological sociology, Latour's radical democraticism, for which scale depends only on the number of connections and "alliances" an actor is able to put into existence, will be compared to Timothy Morton's hyperobjects hypotheses, another ecology based on a peculiar treatment of the notion of scale, in order to show the advantages and the potential of Latour's ecology of fragility. The aim of Latour's politics is the composition of a common world, but this composition has no superior guarantor, and even Gaia, the holistic entity par excellence, cannot be brought into existence without an assembly of allies that Latour compares to a war declaration.

The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, vol. 2, 2021, pp. 218-242.
This paper studies how Ishida Sui's Tokyo Ghoul creates its typical sense of "tragedy," by stressing the injustice inherent in every act of eating, and by generalizing the model of nutrition to every ethically laden act. Ishida undermines the Kantian principle that "ought implies can," depicting a twisted world which forces us into wrongdoing: we have to eat, but there is no Other we can eat with moral impunity. Still, his characters provide some ethical models which could be implemented in our everyday food ethics, given that the tragicality spotted by Ishida is not that alien to our food system: food aesthetics, nihilism, amor fati, living with the tragedy, and letting ourselves be eaten are the options Ishida offers to cope with the tragedy, to approach the devastation our need for food brings into the world in a more aware and charitable way. The examination of Ishida's narrative device, conducted with the mediation of thinkers such as Lévinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, and other contemporary moral philosophers, shall turn the question: "how to become worthy of eating?" into the core problem for food ethics.

Philosophy Kitchen, n. 15, 2021, pp. 25-36.
This paper explores power ontology as an alternative to the traditional passivist view that has justified some human attitudes toward the environment. Once we see powers as a part of nature and every being as endowed with peculiar powers, it becomes possible to see them as normative indications prescribing how to regulate our relationship with the rest of the world. The more consistent instance of power metaphysics is probably offered by Whitehead; however, the legacy of his philosophy of the organism is more often associated with the rebirth of panpsychism. Even if as an ecological strategy panpsychism has the merit to encourage a more charitable attitude toward non-humans, it presents some flaws that make the pluralism of power ontology more desirable, as it considers not only thought but every kind of power as a claimant to value. Finally, a particular kind of power ontology named “materialicism” will be sketched: a study of the powers immanent to materials. Materialicism help us to understand how human projects depend abundantly on the so far neglected powers of matter and how such powers ask for a consideration that can no longer be negated them after the ongoing ecological crisis. The powers of materials express themselves as nomoi (to borrow the concept from Deleuze and Guattari), which consist in what a legislator aware of the active nature of the world should take into consideration for a policy- making suitable to the future of the planet.

La Deleuziana, n. 12 (2020), pp. 25-38.
At the point of convergence between speculative realism, nihilism, and a certain taste for horror culture, "dark philosophies" have emerged as some of the most original theoretical proposals of our times. All these philosophies see virality as the paradigmatic event that disturbs the global axiomatics of capitalism. Today, this globality is precisely what gives virality its enormous strength. What dark philosophies can teach us, through a crossed reflection on current socialpolitical conditions and on the concept of life, is how to draw from virality a possibility for thought: virality is a pharmacological concept, and its meaning will be in a great part dependent on what we will be able to make of it. A thorough reflection on virality could bring us to see in the present situation not only a possibility for new kinds of individuation, but also a catalyst for a type of politics that is perhaps the only possibility to cope with imperial axiomatics.

Il pensare, n. 10, 2020, pp. 56-74.
This paper aims at investigating the role that light plays in Deleuze’s books starting from the Eighties. His neo-Kantian reading of Foucault offers a conception of light as a transcendental principle, close to Goethe’s concept of «pure light»: this «chromatic Spinozism», that sees light and whiteness as the matter of the plane of immanence and darkness as a mere byproduct, is given ontological, esthetical, gnoseological, and ethical value through Deleuze’s renewed appreciation of Bergson’s Matter and Memory and through his studies on cinema. Cinema itself can be conceived as a privileged access to Deleuze’s ethical commitment through the conceptual persona of the «idiot», and the teleology – from bare action to sight and «thinking action» – that he diagnoses in the history of cinema can be seen as the strongest modern affirmation of the teaching of Plato’s myth of the cave: a new way of seeing or a conversion towards the light, that forbids the philosopher to share the doxa of his community, becomes the only way to grasp the «intolerable» in the given historical and social situations, and is turned directly into a means of political action.

Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 4, no. 3 (2020), pp. 5-22.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the debate between supporters of internal and external relations showed how our assumptions on the nature of relations result in ontological, epistemic, and ethical commitments. In this debate, Alfred North Whitehead provided the most articulated and satisfying account through his "philosophy of the organism," which holds relations to be internal yet vectorial, without excluding completely external relations. Today, the debate has become once again topical and constitutes a core issue for speculative realism. This paper aims to show how the theory of external relations endorsed by some leading figures of speculative realism (Meillassoux, Harman, Bryant) does not suffice to preserve the desiderata it was designed for, and how a more serious consideration of Whitehead's theory would have beneficial effects on the ontological and ethical issues of this rejuvenated metaphysical discourse.

Nóema, n. 11 (2020), pp. 68-90.
This paper explores Whitehead’s concept of law as an immanent order, arguing that it can be successfully used to cover the whole semantic field denoted as ‘law’, and especially law in its juridical sense. After showing the features that make it more plausible and more desirable than the opposing view of law as a transcendent imposition, law will be defined as the expression of the modes of existence of individuals within their environment. It will then be tested as a key for understanding the link between life and law and showing the inadequacy of Foucault and Agamben’s biopolitical reflections: if law is an immanent order, then life must be identical with its own inherent normativity. Finally, drawing on Deleuze’s philosophy of right, the fundamental features of an immanent practice of law, a “speculative jurisprudence” which confirms the binding between law, life, and immanence, will be sketched as a proposal for a practical philosophy consistent with Whitehead’s process cosmology.

"Stella Maris", Cormac McCarthy's last book, is arguably the greatest literaly contribution to the concept of "mode of existence" developed by philosophers such as William James, Etienne Souriau and Bruno Latour. This paper accounts for the way Alicia, the protagonist, confronts the multiplicity of modes of existence she finds her world to be populated with, how this affects her perception of reality eventually bringing her in a psychiatric hospital, and how this relates to McCarthy's more classical topics.

The Palestinian question was possibly the dearest political issue for Gilles Deleuze (it seems that he broke up with Michel Foucault because of the Zionist position of the latter). This paper reviews his writings about Palestine, his view of the Arabs as a "war machine" against a colonial "state apparatus" his argument, his confrontation with the typical arguments in favor of the occupation of their land, and the comparison between Nakba and Shoah.

Lo Sguardo, n. XXXI, 2020, pp. 403-415.
Nota di discussione su Denise Vincenti, "Abitudine e follia. Studi di storia della filosofia e della psicologia" (Mimesis, Milano 2019) e "La spontaneità malata. Fisiologia, patologia e alienazione mentale nel pensiero di Félix Ravaisson" (ETS, Pisa 2019)

Both Carlo Sini and Bruno Latour have used a dictum of Einstein's to pose the problem of knowledge and to resolve it through their «philosophies of practices». They agree that knowledge is not an external relation between the subject and the world, but rather that both the world and the subject are byproducts of an original «internal» relation in which they were one single thing. After exposing their views of the problem of knowledge, the conclusion will focus on four differences in their accounts that define two paths for the philosophy of practices: first, Sini sees it as the fulfillment of transcendental philosophy whereas Latour sees it as its dissolution; second, Sini's practice remains human-centered whereas Latour wishes to admit non-humans into his «collective»; third, Sini keeps on dismissing metaphysics whereas Latour tries to convert his «relationism» into a realistic worldview; finally, the opposition between Sini's practice-determinism and Latour's contingentism will let emerge the necessity of a «golden mean» between the two.

The debate around relations started when Bertrand Russell opposed his theory of "external relations" to Leibniz's and Bradley's theories of "internal relations". This debate is today one of the main issues for speculative realism, but paradoxically Leibniz is now considered a hero of pluralism and external relations. This paper accounts for this duplicity, which is not superimposed but is Leibniz's own contribution to the debate, and finds in A. N. Whitehead the secularized version of the monadological theory of relations.

This paper aims to study the virtues and limits of the identification of life and art, in order to overcome the aporias of a vitalist aesthetic through the concept of creation, as found in Bergson and Deleuze's processual ontologies. It will be concerned with the problem, diagnosed by Peter Hallward, of the tendency shared by many philosophies of creation to distinguish the created entities from the creative plane and to deprive the created of any inherent value. An analysis of Bergson's concept of creation, and of its variations enacted by Deleuze, will show how Hallward's challenge can be answered, and how the individual personality comes to coincide with the whole creative effort of life through the Deleuzian concept of singularity: art becomes eventually the model to think a truly creative individuation and its modalities.