Samuel Filby

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the problem of other minds. Although there was once near consensus that there is in fact no problem of knowledge about others, that is no longer so clear. This paper introduces a problem about our awareness of others. By isolating and drawing on features of two familiar problems about other minds—epistemological and conceptual—I point to a problem about other minds that, unlike these other formulations of the problem, shows it to be unique. An upshot of this is that the topic of other minds, or ‘other-knowledge’, is as deserving of its own investigation as the topic of self-knowledge has proven to be in philosophy. I begin by drawing on phenomenology, in which philosophers have had a different orientation toward the problem of others. Some phenomenologists, I argue, ask about what sort of awareness is involved in the basic relation we stand in to others, where this is understood to be different from the basic relation we stand in to the non-mental world. This problem captures two features of the topic of other minds that I claim are unique: mediation and asymmetry.