The You Turn, Naomi Eilan

The past decade has witnessed an exponentially growing body of work conducted under the ‘second person’ heading, in various areas of philosophy, in developmental psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience. Much of this work harks back to Martin Buber’s I and Thou, first published 102 years ago. Despite all this work, what exactly awareness of another as ‘you’ amounts to has proved very difficult to articulate and explain. In her talk, Professor Naomi Eilan sketches an account of such awareness, which locates it in our capacity to stand in communicative relations of mutual address, and gives this capacity a fundamental role in explaining both the link between self- knowledge and knowledge of others, and the link between such knowledge and ethics. This is the seventh lecture in the Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect. See upcoming lectures here: https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/events/philosophy-in-retrospect-and-prospect-centenary-lectures-2025-6/ About the Speaker: Naomi Eilan (BPhil, DPhil, Oxon) is Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University and Director of the Warwick Mind and Action Research Centre. She is on the Advisory Board of the European Society of Philosophy and Psychology and was its President between 2009-2014. She directed several interdisciplinary research projects, funded by the AHRC and the British Academy, including Spatial Representation at Kings College Cambridge, and Consciousness and Self Consciousness, The Second Person and Only Connect, at Warwick. She is editor of the OUP Consciousness and Self Consciousness series of interdisciplinary books, and co-editor of several of its books, including Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds, Problems in Philosophy and Psychology. She has published widely on issues that lie at the intersection of philosophy of mind, metaphysics and psychology. Her current research focuses on the nature of second person thought; knowledge of one's own and other minds; joint attention and joint action; theories of communication.