“Last week, we examined (in very summary fashion) the basic method common in analytic philosophy, and noted that this approach, that relies on propositional logic, leaves some important aporia. Most importantly, I argued that if we only attempt to describe reality from a third-person perspective, we cannot possibly hope to capture any reality that might be available only through other perspectives. For example, the irreducibly first-person perspective of immediate qualitative experience. My suggestion at the end of the piece was that phenomenology (especially capital-p Phenomenology) was at least one important way we could engage in serious philosophical reflection on or from a first-person perspective. Yet, even if we generated a synthetic philosophical method formed from a combination of third-person and first-person accounts of reality, there still seemed to be important aspects of reality that might be left out, namely: our relationships with other persons and, more broadly, ethical considerations.

“Now, some people might deny that these topics reveal any problem with our previously discussed method(s); indeed, as I suggested last week, plenty of philosophers think that all aspects of reality can be exhaustively described and explained purely from a third-person propositional method. If, however, we accept that our own reflection on phenomenality itself, which is, after all, the very window through which we experience reality at all, shows that a purely third-person description of reality will always both be incomplete and also dependent on the very thing it often is used to deny (and my whole substack is basically an extended argument to that effect), then I believe we can discover for ourselves, in the immediacy of the presentation of reality itself, a need for both a third-person and a first-person account of reality—and that, indeed, epistemologically, the latter must always come first.

But if we do accept this delimitation of any third-person philosophical method, including propositional logic, then I believe we must also accept a corresponding delimitation of any phenomenological first-person method, as well. This latter method indeed does give us much that the third-person approach lacks, but it is itself not complete (even if we reduce the third-person method to it). We can come to see this by simply reflecting on the reality of other first-person perspectives.

Continue reading on substack at: https://open.substack.com/pub/phenomenologyeastandwest/p/me-them-and-you-part-2-speaking-to