Learning to Live Without a Self with Jay Garfield
Tricycle Talks
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The Power of Second Persons
Psychologist Vasudevi Reddy argues that we can only come to understand ourselves as sentient minded beings by already having that concept to apply to ourselves. She says infants do that by first recognizing the personhood and sentience of someone else, typically our mother or a caregiver. And so it's not that we first look inside and say, wow, I'm a self... An infant can't wonder whether its mother is a person. That has to be taken for granted. So second persons are actually prior in that sense to first persons.
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