Michel Henry’’s Practical Philosophy

Providing theoretical and applied analyses of Michel Henry’s practical philosophy in light of his guiding idea of Life, this is the first sustained exploration of Henry’s practical thought in anglophone literature, reaffirming his centrality to contemporary continental thought. This book ranges from the tension between his methodological insistence on life as non-intentional and worldly activities to Henry’s engagement with the practical philosophy of intellectuals such as Marx, Freud, and Kandisky to topics of application such as labor, abstract art, education, political liberalism, and spiritual life.

An international team of leading Henry scholars examine a vital dimension of Henry’s thinking that has remained under-explored for too long.

Brian Harding is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas Women’s University, USA. He is author of Not Even a God can Save us Now: Reading Machiavelli after Heidegger (2017) and co-editor with Michael R. Kelly of Early Phenomenology: Metaphysics, Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Michael R. Kelly is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, USA. He is co-editor of Bergson and Phenomenology, 2010), with Jefferey Hansen Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought ( Bloomsbury, 2012), and with Brian Harding, Early Phenomenology: Metaphysics, Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomsbury 2016) and Phenomenology and the Problem of Time (2016).

Jeffrey Hanson is Research Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard University, USA. He is author of Kierkegaard and the Life of Faith: The Aesthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in Fear and Trembling (2017), Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment (2010), and co-editor with Michael R. Kelly of Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought (Bloomsbury, 2013).