Balkan Journal of Philosophy

The topic of this paper concerns the relation between thinking and phenomenality as it is discussed in the Philosophy of Mind. Thus, I am addressing the following questions: does the domain of phenomenal consciousness include thinking? And if so, is the phenomenality of thinking (PT) proprietary or not? I will firstly present the debate and the main notions involved in it, by contrasting a certain mainstream picture of the mind with the one offered by Phenomenology. Second, I will consider the particular question of a proprietary phenomenology of conscious thought through the examination of the reductionist and antireductionist positions, concluding with a sceptical remark towards this dialectics.

Paul Ricoeur’s narrative and critical hermeneutics provides the conceptual resources to accommodate Barthes’ and similar critiques of subjectivity whilepositing a revised form of authorial intention similar to the “postulated author” of Alexander Nehamas and the “creative process” of Richard Wollheim. Though influenced by Barthian critiques, all three thinkers retain a notion of authorial intent*one distinct from the intentions of the historical author*necessary for the understanding of meaning in the philosophy of literature. Yet, the implications of this allow us to reverse the Ricoeurian insight of understanding human action as a text, and show how human action provides clarification on authorial intention. Using Ricoeur and Nehamas, I would like to revisit the issue of authorialintention in order to show the insights this offers for hermeneutics and philosophy of literature. If authorial intention is properly reestablished as distinct from theintentions of the historical writer, we can turn to a minimalistic version of the analytic philosophy of action based on Ricoeur and Carlos Moya to provide auseful heuristic conceptual framework to look at both authorial and ‘readerly’ intention.In employing the philosophy of action, this conceptual framework will be used instrumentally in aid of interpreting the text and providing further analysisand conceptual clarity to the notion of authorial intention. Further, analyzing ‘writerly’ and ‘readerly’ intention as action*communicative action*sidesteps thephilosophical issue of the ‘artistic process’ which had absorbed the attention of aesthetics since Plato, without sidestepping the issues of authorial intention andreaderly intention.1 I will argue that in using variants of the philosophy of action, we can ignore psychological issues and instead focus on the broader issues ofmeaning-expression at the heart of both readerly and writerly intention. I will then demonstrate this heuristic framework using Hölderlin’s epic poetry and Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster.

In 1911, Bergson visited Britain for a number of lectures which led to his increasing popularity. Russell personally encountered Bergson during his lecture atUniversity College London on the 28th of October, and on the 30th of October Bergson attended one of Russell’s lectures. Russell went on to write a numberof critical articles on Bergson, contributing to the hundreds of publications on Bergson which ensued following these lectures.Russell’s critical writings have been seen as part of a history of controversies between so-called ‘Continental’ and ‘Analytic’ philosophers in the twentiethcentury. Yet Russell’s engagement with Bergson’s thought comes as a response to a particular British form of Bergsonism and is involved with the widerphenomenon of the British import of Bergsonism (by figures connected in different ways to Russell, such as Hulme, Wildon Carr or Eliot). Though this may challenge the view of Russell and Bergson as enacting an early version of the ‘Analytic’-‘Continental’ divide, there are however some particular characterisations of Bergson by Russell which contribute to the subsequent formation of the ‘rotten scene’ (Glendinning 2006: 69) of the divide in the second half of the twentieth century.

The so-called bifurcation between analytic and continental philosophies is discussed, from the perspective of Whiteheadian process thought, with the help of four questions: what is the scope and goal of philosophy? do philosophical debates require radical empiricism? could or should philosophy become anexpertise? how does the analytical divide impacts the democratic ideal?