2024 Annual Aquinas Lecture

Personhood and the Problem of Mutual Awareness

Many scholars have noted that social activities such as joint attention involve a sui generis mode of experience in which mutual awareness arises. In such cases, it is not that one person’s experience can be reduced to her own first-person perspective, but rather is tied up with that of her co-attenders. Indeed, mutual awareness involves something akin to a shared first-person perspective. Yet those who attempt to explain the shared character of these experiences face a series of puzzles, one of which concerns the nature of personhood. While this topic has been largely neglected in the broader discussion of mutual awareness, on a common understanding persons are ontologically independent entities who can exist and operate apart from others. As a result, the awareness that accompanies a person’s cognitive acts is unique to the one engaged in that act. If we adopt such an ontology, however, then it is unclear how we could achieve a genuinely shared awareness with others. Nevertheless, Dr. Kintz will suggest that we can make progress here by turning to the philosophical anthropology and cognitional theory of Thomas Aquinas. As Dr. Kintz argues, on a Thomistic framework persons are intrinsically relational, and have certain cognitive and conative powers that can only be co-actualized with other persons within interpersonal relations. Further, on this model we only fully realize what it is to be a person with others. Dr. Kintz will close by sketching an account of how this ontology contributes to a satisfactory theory of mutual awareness.