A Phenomenology of Thirdness in Law: Preliminary Remarks

This brief philosophical remarks on the figure of the third party within the legal realm aim to describe a phenomenology of thirdness. Various dimensions of human experience show a relevant connection with thirdness: in language, thirdness is the space that transcends words; in politics, as in law, it is the constitutive element of relationships and a fundamental portion of the rule of law; in ethics, finally, the concept of responsibility also, if not above all, rests on the category of thirdness. These dimensions show a possible common underlying sense of the concept of thirdness. Without delving into one dimension of human experience in particular, the paper briefly shows some emerging properties of thirdness. Thirdness seems to be a fertile possibility to overcome binarism in relationships.