Knowledge of Persons

European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 (4):3--28 (2013)
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Abstract

What is knowledge of persons, and what is knowing persons like? my answer combines Wittgenstein’s epistemology with levinas’s phenomenology. It says that our knowledge of persons is a hinge proposition for us. And it says that what this knowledge consists in is the experience that levinas calls ”the face to face’: direct and unmediated encounter between persons. As levinas says, for there to be persons at all there has, first, to be a relationship, language, and this same encounter: ”the face to face’ comes first, the existence of individual persons only second. I explore some consequences of this conception for how we think about personhood, and also for how we read Descartes and Augustine.

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Sophie Grace Chappell
Open University (UK)

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