The UH Manoa Department of Philosophy Colloquium Series presents

A Just Claim to Know Another Person?

by Arindam Chakrabarti

We need friends to live and flourish as human beings. Friendship demands reciprocal knowledge of each other. Knowledge traditionally requires truth and justification. But knowing another person in a way that “does justice” to them without turning the other subject into an object of knowledge or a mere means to one’s ego-enhancing rational benefit calculation appears to be impossible. Keeping Aristotle’s concept of friendship of virtue (rather than of pleasure or utility) in mind, and making a nuanced use of P.F. Strawson’s epoch-making distinction between reactive and objective attitudes towards other people, I try to seek a way out of this conundrum of claiming to know the other person –a friend-­with justification and justice. Knowing a friend, avoiding bias or objectification, thus, may turn into a “regulative ideal” in the Kantian sense!