The third person: a philosophicalanthropological proposal contrasted with the sociological approach

Abstract

Recent approaches in social theory stress the significance of the third against the dominance of the dyadic paradigm. Arising in the dyad, the social normative order is objectified and thereafter personalized by the third, who also empirically attributes the recognition as person. Contrasting with this empirical standpoint, I propose a philosophical-anthropological approach according to which the tri-positional structure of sociality constitutes the transcendental condition of possibility of culture and of the “way of being” of the human being as person.