Keren Gorodeisky

How can we understand people—ourselves and others? Does this require a special form of understanding, different from how we understand non-human phenomena? In this paper, I develop a Beauvoirian-inspired proposal for answering these questions. This proposed account of understanding people lends some support to a long tradition, according to which, we don't understand people in the same way that we understand non-human natural phenomena insofar as understanding people (like literary works) requires an empathic, imaginative, simulationist, or interpretive form. Yet, the Beauvoirian view complicates and challenges this tradition by bringing out the irreducibly second-personal structure of understanding people. It also highlights its embodied and ethical character. In emphasizing these, the Beauvoirian account offers a welcome alternative to empathic views of understanding people (and of relating to literature) and contributes to our understanding of the second-person nexus. It also proposes a refreshing way of thinking about the ethical dimensions of epistemology.

We argue that the aesthetic domain falls inside the scope of rationality, but does so in its own way. Aesthetic judgment is a stance neither on whether a proposition is to be believed nor on whether an action is to be done, but on whether an object is to be appreciated. Aesthetic judgment is simply appreciation. Correlatively, reasons supporting theoretical, practical and aesthetic judgments operate in fundamentally different ways. The irreducibility of the aesthetic domain is due to the fact that aesthetic judgment is a sensory-affective disclosure of, and responsiveness to, merit: it is a feeling that presents an object, and is responsive to it, as worthy of being liked. Aesthetic judgment is thus shown to be, on the hand, first personal and non-transferable; and, on the other hand, a presentation of reality. We thereby capture what is right in both subjectivist and objectivist conceptions of aesthetic judgment.