Introduction

The present volume grew out of a two-year SIAS Summer Institute titled The Second Person: Comparative Perspectives that took place at the National Institute of Humanities at Chapel Hill in August, 2011, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in August, 2012. The participants of that institute set out to examine the concept of the second person. Though supposedly that concept had recently moved into the center of research in a number of distinct fields (although not necessarily always under that description), up until that point little systematic attempt had been made to comprehend it in its full generality. In fact, researchers within each of these fields appeared to be largely unconscious of strikingly parallel developments in the other fields. What we are here calling “the second person” presently goes by many names. The terminology employed to designate it not only varies tremendously from one field to the next, but such changes in terminology are often regarded as changes in topic. When viewed from this perspective, the concerns of this volume may appear to be quite scattered—ranging over topics as ostensibly diverse as those of “joint intention”, “bi-polar relations”, “trust”, “authority”, “justice”, “recognition”, and “acknowledgment”. The present volume inherits the aim of the original Summer Institute out of which it grows: to do justice to the particularities of the phenomena appearing in these different guises, while at the same time seeking to reveal a common underlying problem, with the aim of uncovering the ubiquity of a single conceptual structure. Accordingly, a secondary aim of both that Institute and this volume is to overcome a number of disciplinary and institutional divides that have plagued inquiry into the topic, not only between fields of inquiry, but even within them. The following four divides are especially noteworthy here: (1) between historians of ideas and contemporary theoreticians, (2) between European-Continental and Anglo-American theoretical traditions, (3) between traditions of empirical inquiry into and a priori reflection on the capacities of higher animals, and (4) between theorists of the foundations of practical agency and theorists of the foundations of theoretical cognition. Each of the essays collected in this volume seeks to bridge one or more of these divides. Collectively, they seek to uncover a topic whose true contours until now have largely been obscured from view.

I. AN OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE: THE SECOND PERSON

The term we apply to designate the unifying topic of this volume—“the second person”—is one that has acquired a recent currency in certain quarters. Someone who surveys the literature in philosophy over the past decade—and not least in that portion of it that seeks close contact with empirical psychological or even neurological research—might well gain the impression that a new topic has emerged, attracting great interest across a wide range of fields. In this literature, the term “second person” is presented as signifying a novel perspective from which mind and action, morality and knowledge, are now to be approached. This perspective is sometimes heralded as being superior to, indeed superseding, traditional philosophical approaches based on either the first-person perspective of the thinker and agent or the third-person perspective of the theoretician and observer.

This unity of rhetoric notwithstanding, the same survey, however, is likely to throw a reader into confusion, as she will find it difficult to discern the presence of a corresponding unity of idea animating the various debates proclaiming to advance a second-personal account of their topic. There are two reasons for this, which each, though in converse ways, attest to a regrettable dominance of the word “the second person” over the concept it signifies. The first of these reasons has to do with the ways in which the various portions of this body of secondary literature remain poorly acquainted with one another, while supposedly being committed to adapting the method found in one area to the treatment of problems in another. Hence, while one area of thought may pick up the terminology of “the second person” from another, this generally happens in such a way that they end up agreeing merely in word and not in concept. For...