ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two important moments in the French reception of Condillac: the influence of his Traité des sensations (1754) on Maine de Biran’s Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée (1805), and the resumption of that influence in Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life as exposed in Incarnation (2000). The role of Maine de Biran in Henry’s phenomenology is already known. However, how he integrates Condillac’s sensualism into his material phenomenology is a question to be addressed. I claim that Henry’s Condillacism is built on Biran’s legacy. Whenever Henry wants to pay tribute to Maine de Biran’s unprecedented discovery of the very being of the ego, he underlines the essential role played in this discovery by Biran’s criticism of Condillac.
