Second-Person Accounts and the Problem of Evil

Abstract

Abstract It has become customary in philosophy to distinguish between what is often called a third-person point of view and a first-person point of view. The difference is hard to define precisely but easy to illustrate; it is perhaps most notable in philosophy of mind.1 When, from my first-person point of view, I observe the mind I know best, my own, I am aware of beliefs, doubts, questions, desires, inclinations, willings, and things of this sort. But if a neurologist were to examine me, what he would perceive from his third-person point of view is something very different. He would observe synapses, neurochemicals and their receptors, neurons, clumps of nuclei and bands of fibers, topological maps, and things of this sort. He would not see beliefs and desires. None of the things he finds from his third-person point of view are observable to me from my first-person point of view when I introspect; and what I find from my first-person point of view, beliefs and desires and the rest, is not apparent to the neurologist from his third-person point of view.