S. Bredlau, The other in perception, a phenomenological account of our experiences of other persons

Laura McMahon

pp. 419-423

Review of:

Bredlau Susan, The Other in perception: a phenomenological account of our experience of other persons, SUNY Press, Albany, 2018.

I would like to start this review of Susan Bredlau’s The Other in Perception: A Phenomenological Account of Our Experiences of Other Persons with a reflection on the book’s principal conclusion: the nature of our experience of other persons—and with this the so-called “problem of other minds”—is not merely an academic epistemological issue, but an ethical issue of concrete significance to how we live our lives with others. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s discussion of “the face” in Totality and Infinity, Bredlau identifies the following paradox in our experience of other persons asother persons—a paradox that renders artificial any strict demarcation of the epistemological and the ethical when it comes to our encounters with others. Our experience of the face of the other is an experience of “infinity” in the form of irreducibility of the other to our own perspective of her. For this reason, the face of the other poses at once a personal challenge and an ethical command: on the one...