Chapter 1 introduces the fundamental tenets of perspectivism, its main characteristics and principles and the problems and challenges it poses for archaeology. A brief account of the genesis of perspectivism as a theory is provided, drawing principally on Viveiros de Castro’s writings and comparing it to other ontologies, particularly animism. The key perspectivist characteristics shared by many Amerindian populations are detailed. These include the quality internal to many entities of possessing a human soul, the importance of the body as the distinctive mark of subjects, seeing the world from a human point of view and predation as the model for human relationships. These fundamental cosmological premises derive from a set of underlying metaphysical principles with consequences for social practices, all of which are relevant for thinking about the archaeological record.

This chapter explores how Nietzsche’s shift towards a naturalistic methodology in the late 1870s offers him an axiological and epistemic apparatus that radically alters his philosophical articulation of pessimism, and consequently affects his attitude towards it. The chapter argues that contemporary Nietzsche scholarship has largely overlooked the importance of Human, All Too Human as a crucial stage of Nietzsche’s development in approaching the question of the value of existence. By exploring the influence of Paul Rée, Eugen Dühring, and the neo-Kantians, it introduces Nietzsche’s own ‘frame of reference’ argument against pessimism as a metaphysical view, and distinguishes between different possible interpretations of it.

“This chapter focuses on the two main philosophical questions raised by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. First is the problem of perspectivism, the idea that objectivity is impossible because knowledge is circumscribed by human subject positions. Differences between the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels suggest that Swift recognized no stable relationship between truth ‘in itself’ and what individuals believe about the world, but only comparisons in quality or scope between different perspectives. Second is a question about the relative validity of two different positions in Christian ethics: the optimistic neo-Stoicism espoused by Swift’s friend Alexander Pope, and the pessimistic Augustinianism preferred by Swift himself. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift gave eloquent expression both to his scepticism about the beneficence of God and nature and to his narrow estimation of the limits of human reason.”

This chapter is a declaration of the author’s translational assumptions: rhythm is a force that resists the signified; translation promotes sense-making rather than the gathering of meaning, the relational and the associative rather than the intelligible; back-translation is indispensable to translational exchange and dialecticity; translation operates most fruitfully in the ST’s invisible; the text is not the ST but the totality of its possibilities. A translation of Rilke’s sonnet to Orpheus 1, 5 exemplifies this notion of totality. And the translational involvement of the performing body is illustrated in a translation of the first stanza of Verlaine’s ’En sourdine’. In conclusion, the chapter revisits distinctions between vocative and accusative perspectives, sense and meaning.

Scientific realism is usually taken as a thesis that science states the truth about the world. In contrast, I conceive realism in and about science as a commitment to maximize our learning about realities. This is an operational and realistic ideal because realities are mind-framed entities, and we can learn empirical truths about them by devising operationally coherent activities involving them. My brand of realism is akin to Putnam’s internal realism, and perspectival realism. The mode of inquiry motivated by realism as I see it is iterative, because inquiry must start from some inherited basis. And it is pluralist in the sense of recommending that inquiry should explore multiple directions with no in-principle restrictions. While my conception of realism is modest in some clear ways, it is also ambitious, in that it follows an imperative of progress: always seek to increase and improve knowledge maximally. For this reason I designate my position as ‘activist realism’.

Weber’s thesis of the disenchantment of the world is interpreted as “we-prison” in Dialogical Self Theory (DST). As a counter-example, the phenomenon of awe is presented as an experience that opens the self to the wider universe. In that context, Martin Buber’s work on spirituality and Rollo May’s work on creativity are compared. The shadow sides of mystical experiences are outlined and compared with psychotic states of the mind. The work of Aldous Huxley who described the workings of mescaline as a facilitator of mystical insight is presented. Mystical experiences change the so-called “minimal self” on a more basic sensorial level, and they differ from the narrating and the positioning self. Furthermore, Donald Crosby’s “perspectivism” is incorporated in DST under the heading of “positionalism.” As a practical implication, specific guidelines are presented in order to open the self to the experience of awe as a first step to the “depositioning” of the self.

The aim of this chapter is to provide a thorough account of the fact that Ernst Mach and Friedrich Nietzsche are often associated with each other in the specialised literature on the history of philosophy and the philosophy of science. I argue that the consistency which can be discovered between them is much more substantial than one may imagine. On the basis of their conception of knowledge and truth, it is possible to outline a complete parallelism between their approach to the issue concerning our intellectual relationship with the external world. In fact, Mach and Nietzsche dealt with the very same questions and indeed pursued a common general aim, namely the elimination of worn-out conceptions from the world of modern culture. Furthermore, I will maintain that Mach’s and Nietzsche’s research interests converge on the classic problem of realism versus anti-realism, and that it is in the light of this particular issue that their own views can be compared.

Like many of Nietzsche’s striking words and phrases, “perspectivism” (“Perspektivismus”) has received a great deal of attention in the secondary literature. However, Nietzsche uses the term only once in his published and authorized manuscripts, twice in fragments from 1886 to 1887, and once in a fragment from 1888. While tantalizing, GS 354 and the three fragments from 1886 to 1888 radically underdetermine what Nietzsche could have meant by “perspectivism.” In order to shed light on Nietzsche’s perspectivism, I approach it from two angles. First, I explore some of the rhetorical tropes that Nietzsche uses to reorient his audience’s perspective. These include engaging the audience’s emotions, apostrophic address to the reader, and what I’ve elsewhere called “Nietzschean summoning.” Each of these methods tugs at the affects and values of the audience, positioning them to notice, find salient, and be disposed to act in relation to certain (aspects of) things while ignoring, finding less salient, and being disposed to neglect (aspects of) other things. This suggests that, for Nietzsche, perspectivism has less to do with cognition than the painterly metaphor of a visual perspective suggests. Second, I employ the digital humanities methodology pioneered in my recent work to further elucidate the concept of perspectivism. I argue that, for Nietzsche, perspectivism relates primarily to agents’ motivational and evaluative sets, and that it is meant to offer a methodology for achieving various epistemic goods.

The article considers Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy by giving a careful interpretation of aphorism 373 of book V of The Gay Science. In this important aphorism, Nietzsche puts forward the idea that all genuine philosophical judgments are akin to a judgment about “the value of a piece of music,” and hence akin to judgments that express “what good taste demands” (GS 373). The article takes this to mean that, for Nietzsche, philosophical judgments are value-judgments, and value-judgments are aesthetic judgments (or judgments of taste). On this basis, the article then tries to take two further steps: first, to show that Nietzsche understands aesthetic judgments by the lights of Kant’s conception of taste as a “reflective taste” (CJ 8), thereby conceiving of aesthetic value-judgments as reflective judgments; second, the article argues that Nietzsche’s view of philosophical judgments as reflective value-judgments is the basis of his rejection of a positivist (or, in modern vocabulary, naturalist) conception of philosophy. Finally, the article links Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy to his conception of life as akin to music, and thus as having a polysemic, perspectival, and interrogative nature (or the “character of a question-mark”, GS 375).