Abstract:Taking up the question of style, I argue that this term provides a generative framework for reassessing the historical challenges of feminist writing and politics. To develop my argument, I read Judith Butler's philosophy alongside Denise Riley's poems, historical criticism, and philosophical prose, proposing that both writers are inventive participants in the tradition of immanent critique. I demonstrate how feminist questioning of linguistic conventions and social norms is enfolded in Butler's paratextual reflections on philosophical grammar and in Riley's poetic and (...) theoretical efforts to acknowledge her uneasy relationship to lyric. Any dialogue between philosophy and poetry returns us to the longstanding debate about the value of these respective disciplines. I conclude by proposing that Riley and Butler encourage us to consider that each demands the other as a supplement—a necessity that emerges from the need to account for the collective life in which language is embedded. (shrink)

This paper takes its departure from a cluster of approaches to Intentionality that could be headed under the title “Naturalizing Intentionality.” The author groups them into two different arguments: The defenders of the Original-Derived Intentionality argument hold that while there may be such a thing as originalintentionality understood in Brentano’s sense which applies to the mental, we usually extend this intentionality to processes, machines and all sorts of other things. The defenders of the Basic-Higher Order Intentionality argument on the other (...) hand claim that it is physical objects that display basic intentionality, while the human mind has intentionality of a higher order. For both approaches the aim is to show that intentionality can be understood as something exhibitedby non-mental items and thus it can be claimed that what thoughts or bits of language are about is physical in the last instance. The author argues that both arguments are merely inversions of each other and cannot successfully naturalize the phenomenon of intentionality as about-ness of physical items. Furthermore it is exactly the cooperation between the mental and the physical and no reduction of one to the other that can explain the phenomenon of intentionality. Subsequently the author will discuss John McDowell’s Kantian approach to intentionality, which may at first look like a version of the Basic-Higher Order argument, since McDowell distinguishes first and second nature. However, the author shows that already McDowell’s first nature is imbued with conceptuality in that he starts with receptivity in operation. For McDowell, not intentionality of the mind is naturalized, but nature is always already intellectualized or intentionalized. (shrink)