Conference: The Second Person
Organized by James Conant and Costas Pagondiotis,
June 23-25, 2026,
Conference and Cultural Center of the University of Patras, Room II.9.
This conference examines the philosophical significance of the second person — understood not merely as a distinctive content of thought, but as a form of interpersonal nexus in which persons address one another as “you”. Recent work in the philosophy of mind, action, ethics, and language has argued that this form cannot be derived from first-personal self-relation or from third-personal observation, either separately or in combination. On this view, it is an irreducibly reciprocal mode of rational relatedness, paradigmatically realized when persons genuinely address and respond to one another. These paradigmatic cases bring into view a more general condition of our understanding of personhood: what it is to be a person and what it is to stand in relation to another person cannot be treated as wholly separate. The second-person form is therefore fundamental to the way self-conscious subjects relate to one another in shared practices.
If this is right, the philosophical significance of the second person extends beyond explicit acts of address. What such acts make especially visible is an underlying form that structures a wide range of interpersonal phenomena — among them joint attention and joint action, recognition, trust, and mutual understanding, as well as more overtly addressive practices such as requesting and commanding, testifying and promising, blaming and holding one another answerable. These phenomena are not best understood as aggregates of self-standing unilateral acts. They are, rather, different articulations of an essentially bipolar relation in which the two poles are internally related without losing their separateness. In non-defective cases of such a relation, each participant encounters the other not simply as an object of knowledge or observation, but as someone to whom one is already normatively responsive. Second-personal knowledge of another is therefore not a merely epistemic achievement to which a practical stance is subsequently added. To know another as “you” is to stand in a relation of address and response in which understanding the address is inseparable from responsiveness to it, and the epistemic and the practical are internally unified.
The conference brings together leading philosophers whose work explores the second person as a form of rational relatedness that is central to self-consciousness and consciousness of others, internally connected with the grammar of the first person, implicated in irreducibly bipolar obligations and forms of accountability, and essential to shared agency, trust, and forms of life. Through these intersecting lines of inquiry, the conference aims to advance our understanding of how persons can be genuinely known to one another, rather than merely known about from an external standpoint, and why the second-person form is indispensable for an adequate account of human mindedness, sociality, and normativity.
The conference has received funding from the Special Account for Research Funds of the University of Patras.
