Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie: Perspektivität Heft 44.3/2019

• Jörg Volbers: Perspektivität ist kein »Käfig«. Eine kurze Einführung in den Schwerpunkt Buy article

  • Lars Leeten: Was verlangt die Perspektivität vom Erkennen? Zum Umgang mit endlichen Horizonten
    

    Abstract

    This paper asks what it would mean for epistemic practices to take irreducible perspectivity into account. It starts with the premise that such perspectivity cannot be explained on the basis of conceptual logic alone, but only by virtue of the logic of sensual perception. Following Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, four requirements are developed that irreducible perspectivity demands from epistemic practice: interminable movement, broadening horizons, bearing disharmonies and the presupposition of different horizons. As soon as truth-oriented practice is detached from the traditional idea of final insights into ›things themselves‹, as it survives in the concepts of epistemology, it emerges as a concrete, mundane endeavour that continuously has to deal with the possibility that the world might be understood better, deeper or differently.
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  • Susanne Schmetkamp: Ästhetische Erfahrung als Perspektivenwechsel
    

    Abstract

    The aim of this paper is to explore the potential of aesthetic experience for a change of perspective. It is one of the most important sources of the possibility, reflection and extension of perspectives. More precisely, according to the thesis presented here, it is the aesthetic experience, which as aesthetic implies the change of perspective, the reversal or alteration of accustomed, possibly false perspectives and the pointing out of new perspectives. A decisive difference to our other practices, in which we (must) also engage with other perspectives, is that the aesthetic is a play with perspectives, in which we as recipients and, in a certain sense, participants are epistemically and morally relieved. The medium film is discussed as a paradigmatic medium of such aesthetic change of perspective.
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  • Nicolas Oxen: Politiken der »prehension« – Agnès Vardas Essay-Filme und Alfred N. Whiteheads Prozessphilosophie
    

    Abstract

    This article deals with Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), a film that is not only a portrait of gleaners, but is itself a gleaning film. Varda gleans her moving images with a handheld camcorder and develops an essayistic and cinematographic thinking. In Alfred N. Whithead’s process philosophy the concept of prehension (from »to grasp«) describes a non-representational and bodily mode of perception and a process metaphysical theory of relationality. Following a media-philosophical perspective, this article tries to see and to describe Varda’s film through the lens of Whitehead’s concepts and to read Whitehead anew through Varda’s film. By using this method, the article wants to stress the aesthetical and political aspects of Agnès Varda’s film-making, as well as the relevance of Whitehead’s concept of prehension for topics and questions in media theory and media philosophy.
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  • Sybille Krämer: Was bedeutet »Perspektivität«? Eine Erörterung mit Blick auf Leibniz
    

    Abstract

    The philosophical idea of perspective draws on two different cultural techniques of representation: on the one hand, the central perspective painting technique of a fictitious three-dimensionality that works with geometric projection from the perspective of the viewer in front of the picture. On the other hand, the cartographic principle of knowledge visualizations in the form of maps, diagrams, and schemas, which shows two-dimensional structural images without fictitious three-dimensionality from a bird’s eye perspective. The central perspective representation embodies the first-person perspective, while the cartographic representation embodies the third-person perspective. It is well known that Leibniz introduced perspective as a philosophical concept – concentrated in his theory of monads: the monads incessantly generate local representations of the entire universe. Less well known, however, is how Leibniz, in the development of his concept of perspectivity, refers to the interplay of both forms of perspective in order to show why perspectivity and universality not exclude but rather include each other. This has far-reaching implications for the understanding of Leibniz’s metaphysics and epistemology.
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  • Oliver Marchart: Für einen parteilichen Universalismus. Radikale Demokratie zwischen Pluralismus und Antagonismus
    

    Abstract

    The article is based on the suspicion that behind liberal-democratic perspectivism, which trades under the political title of pluralism, there is nothing other than an ›actually existing‹ oligarchy that has found its own form of fundamentalism in the narrative of pluralism. But if one does not see the alternative to this in authoritarianism and mono-perspectivity, then liberal pluralism must be confronted with a democratic alternative that preserves a degree of plurality indispensable in democracies without assuming the ideological narrative of pluralism. The article sets itself the task of designing a notion of plurality that is not liberal and allows an affirmative reference to the instance of the political, i.e. of antagonism. This task is pursued in a critical discussion of two variants of the so-called agonistic theory of democracy. First, the Arendtian-Nietzschean variant (in Hannah Arendt herself, and in William Connolly) is questioned in regard to their relationship to plurality/perspectivity and conflictuality. In a second step, this variant will be confronted with the post-Marxist variant, associated with Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau and Étienne Balibar. Finally, to solve the problem of how to present a non-pluralistic notion of plurality, a democratic universalism is proposed that defines plurality in the sense of partisanship.
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Essay:

• Oliver Müller: Warum »autonome« Waffensysteme Gegenstand der Philosophie sein sollten Buy article

Buchbesprechungen:

• Max Lowdin / Daniela Voss: »Cesser d’être dupés«: Badiou und der Eigensinn des Marxismus
• Sascha Freyberg: Ansätze zu einer Beziehungsgeschichte der Prozessphilosophie