Past Event: Post-Kant working group: Emmanuel Alloa (Yale)

Title: The Three Perspectivisms

Abstract: Perspectivism is getting bad press these days. Stressing the importance of points of view seems to commit us to shutting ourselves off in sectarian attitudes, to ensconcing ourselves in shrines of singlemindedness. While perspectivism is associated with relativism in a post-truth age, this is not necessarily true of all kinds of perspectivism. On the contrary, a robust perspectivism might be the only convincing way to defend realism today. Drawing on the forthcoming book The Share of Perspective, the talk will suggest a way of mapping both classical (Leibniz, Nietzsche) and contemporary perspectivisms in a new fashion. Beyond the two dominant kinds of perspectivism (“reclusive” and “additive”), a third kind – tentatively called “diagonal perspectivism” – overcomes the limitations of the previous ones. Drawing on insights from the history of art and of science, diagonal perspectivism compels us to acknowledge that the point of view is not only what divides, it is also what is shared.

Emmanuel Alloa is professor of philosophy at the University of Fribourg, where he holds the Chair for Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. He has long taught at the University Paris 8 and at the Collège international de philosophie, and has held Invited Professorships at the universities of Berkeley, Weimar, Belo Horizonte, Vienna, Columbia and Turin. He currently serves as President of the German Society of Aesthetics. Among his publications in English: Resistance of the Sensible World. An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty (Fordham UP 2017); Looking Through Images. A Phenomenology of Visual Media (Columbia UP 2021); The Share of Perspectives (Routledge, 2024).