Following the revival in the last decades of the concept of "organism", scholarly literature in philosophy of science has shown growing historical interest in the theory of Immanuel Kant, one of the "fathers" of the concept of self-organisation. Yet some recent theoretical developments suggest that self-organisation alone cannot fully account for the all-important dimension of autonomy of the living. Autonomy appears to also have a genuine "interactive" dimension, which concerns the organism's functional interactions with the environment and does not simply derive from its internal organisation. Against this background, we focus on a family of natural philosophical approaches that historically have already strongly taken in account this aspect of autonomy, notably going beyond Kant's perspective on self-organisation. We thus review Hegel, Plessner, and Jonas' different perspectives on living beings, focussing in particular on four points: the distinction between organic and inorganic, the theory of biological organisation, the processuality of the living, and the "boundary" between inside and outside, through which the organism establishes its relationship to the environment. We, then, compare the three perspectives on these four points, and finally address the question of what advantages their contribution present-especially compared to Kant's theory-with respect to the topic of organism's autonomy. This could help-we hope-to better understand what is at the stake still today.

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Kant usually characterizes sensibility as receptivity. Hence it can seem paradoxical to speak of the "activity of sensibility" in his philosophy. Yet that sensible representations are receptive in origin does not necessarily mean that their content is due to our receptivity alone. In fact, as early as his 1770 inaugural dissertation Kant assumes acts of coordinating the sensible as conditions of sensible knowledge. In the context of his anthropology he then attributes these acts to the so-called "formative faculty" which he conceives as part of sensibility. With the concept of the formative faculty Kant unifies Baumgarten's conception of the lower cognitive faculty. Moreover he outlines his own theory of the activity of sensibility by means of the formative faculty and its various facets. Furthermore, a closer look at the various transcriptions of Kant's lectures on anthropology shows that, in the late 1770s, the concept of the imagination supplants that of the formative faculty as the foundation of his conception of an active sensibility, and shows also how the distinction between productive and reproductive imagination is able to stand in for the various facets of the formative faculty. The paper concludes with a brief look at the prospects beyond the field of anthropology.

Philosophical anthropology offers two ways of structuring the concept of person, either by locating the essence of man in his being a person or by providing a bio- philosophy of personhood. Building on the work of Helmuth Plessner, this essay aims at conciliating both structurings. It argues for the thesis that personhood is the life-form of man and discusses the main structural features of human life-form.