The Second Person : Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives

The past few years have witnessed an exponentially growing body of work conducted under the ‘second person’ heading. This idea has been explored in various areas of philosophy (philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, ethics, epistemology), in developmental psychology, in psychiatry, and even in neuroscience. We may call this interest in the second person the ‘You Turn’. To put it at its most general, and ambitious, the idea driving much of the work is this: proper attention to the ways in which we relate to one another when we stand in second person relation to each other can deliver something like a paradigm shift in the way in which we address questions about a range of fundamental issues in these fields.

There is, however, very little agreement about what second person relations are, and a huge variation in why people think they are important. The contributions to this book focus on developing key second-person claims in the philosophy of mind, ethics and epistemology, with the aim of beginning to provide a framework for assessing and relating the multitude of fascinating new questions that come up under the second person heading.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Philosophical Explorations.