The Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the “We”

Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran’s edited collection of essays, Phenomenology of Sociality – Discovering the ‘We’ [PoS hereafter] has a two-fold aim. The first is to highlight the fruitful ways in which the phenomenological tradition can be brought to bear on current trends in analytic philosophy and interdisciplinary research focused on the nature of various social phenomena, such as joint-attention, joint-intentionality, group-formation, shared affectivity, and shared responsibility. We might refer to this as the volume’s pluralist-interdisciplinary aim. In the pursuit of this aim, numerous essays in PoS helpfully locate phenomenological approaches to sociality with respect to Michael Bratman and Margaret Gilbert’s works on collective identity and joint-agency; Stephen Darwall’s second-person standpoint ethics; Austinian speech-act theory; contemporary developments on the nature of social cognition in cognitive science and developmental psychology, etc. The second aim of PoS is broadly historical. This aim translates into a number of essays that primarily offer careful re-examinations of phenomenological distinctions and taxonomies, provided by canonical but also by lesser-known phenomenologist, with an eye to demonstrating phenomenology’s ability to shed light on intersubjective experience and the social world in its multi-layered manifestations. The more historically oriented essays will surely be of interest to those who already possess a solid familiarity with and interest in the phenomenological tradition and its guiding concepts. For this review, however, I have chosen to focus on a selection of articles that contribute primarily to the volume’s pluralist-interdisciplinary aim, since, I take it, this aligns most directly with the interests of the readers of the Journal of Social Ontology. In the phenomenological tradition it is widely argued that second-person experience plays a primary role in our understanding of others; the constitution of the social world; and the objective world more generally (for a compelling account that emphasizes the latter, see Cathal O’Madagain’s integrative contribution to the volume, which augments Donald Davidson’s interactionbased approach to objectivity with Husserl’s intersubjective approach to theorize