On a Cartesian conception of the mind, I could be a solitary being and still have the same mental states as I currently have. This paper asks how the lives of other people fit into this conception. I investigate the second-person perspective—thinking of others as ‘you’ while engaging in reciprocal communicative interactions with them—and argue that it is neither epistemically nor metaphysically distinctive. I also argue that the Cartesian picture explains why other people are special: because they matter not just (...) for the effect that they have on us. (shrink)

In our life with science, we trust experts; we form judgements by inference from past evidence. We conduct ourselves very differently in the aesthetic domain. We avoid deferring to aesthetic experts. We form our judgements through direct perception of particulars rather than through inference. Why the difference? I suggest that we avoid aesthetic testimony and aesthetic inference, not because they’re unusable, but because we have adopted social norms to avoid them. Aesthetic appreciation turns out to be something like a game. (...) We have laid down certain rules and restrictions in order to shape a kind of activity we cherish. And aesthetic properties turn out to be a kind of social construct. Much like the goal of a game, they are constituted in part by our obedience to certain rules. The norms of aesthetic life are different from those of science because our purposes are different. We engage in science to get the right answers; we engage in aesthetic appreciation to be absorbed in the activity of the sensuous perception of particulars. Our aesthetic practices are a constructed shelter from science; they restore to us a small domain where we may once again engage in our own sensuous perception of particulars. (shrink)