Knowledge of Persons

Abstract

What is knowledge of persons, and what is knowing persons like? my answer combines (a bit of) Wittgenstein’s epistemology with (a bit of) levinas’s phenomenology. It says that our knowledge of persons is a hinge proposition for us (as in: ‘I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’, PI ii, iv). 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.