The first volume in this series (The View from Within, ed. Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear) was a study of first-person approaches to the study of consciousness. Second-person 'I-You' relations are central to human life yet have been neglected in consciousness research. This book puts that right, and goes further by including descriptions of animal 'person-to-person' interactions from primatologists Barbara Smuts and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. Other contributions are drawn from fields as diverse as Japanese philosophy and Buddhist studies, neurophysiology, phenomenology and neuropsychology - including clinical studies on autism and face-recognition disorders.
Evan Thompson is associate professor in the department of philosophy at York University, Ontario. He is the author of Colour Vision and The Embodied Mind (with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch). Forthcoming books include The Philosophy of Perception: Selected Readings (MIT Press) and Why the Mind Isn't in the Head (Harvard).