Professor Naomi Eilan: The You Turn

It’s 100 years since the first Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures were held in 1925. To mark the centenary, the 2025/6 London Lecture Series focuses on the theme Philosophy in Retrospect and in Prospect. Distinguished philosophers have been invited to reflect on where their area of the discipline has got to over the last hundred years, and/or where it might go – or should go – over the next hundred.

All lectures include a post-lecture "in conversation" session with our Academic Director Edward Harcourt, followed by audience Q&A.

The past decade or so has witnessed an exponentially growing body of work conducted under the ‘second person’ heading, in various areas of philosophy, where the idea is that appeal to the second person can solve or dissolve longstanding problems in explaining our knowledge of others and the link between such knowledge and ethics. In Professor Naomi Eilan’s talk, drawing in some if this work, she will sketch an account of second person awareness on which (a) the very capacity for self- consciousness is said to depend on our capacity to enter into communicative, mutual, I-you relations, and (b) second person awareness of others is essentially ethically laden, making ethics internal to our most basic mental capacities for self- and other awareness.

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.