Jürgen Habermas has argued that the approach of philosophers to almost every aspect of knowledge and inquiry has been conceived in what he calls monological terms. This means that the logos of things – the rational principle that makes their existence and nature comprehensible to us – is something that we possess, to the extent that we do so, as individuals and not jointly or collectively, at least in any essential way. In support of his thesis, Habermas might well have pointed out that in the eyes of many philosophers even the epistemic relation in which we stand to one another has appeared far from secure. These philosophers typically construe the issue posed by the claim we make to have knowledge of the existence of other intelligent beings like ourselves as what they call the “problem of other minds.” In such an approach, the philosophical inquirer is assumed to be already situated in and familiar with a world that lends itself to the kind of comprehension that eventually finds full expression in the sciences of nature. At the same time, however, he is supposed to be in a position that enables him to raise doubts as to whether there is any other being that is like him in this respect.

Not surprisingly, this “problem” proves to be insoluble when posed in these terms. In the circumstances that are being presupposed, anything I can point to in the world as an index of the presence of other beings who, like me, can perceive and think and remember is itself part of the world as a self-contained system of objects.