Knowledge from a Human Point of View

This open access book – as the title suggests – explores some of the historical roots and epistemological ramifications of perspectivism. Perspectivism has recently emerged in philosophy of science as an interesting new position in the debate between scientific realism and anti-realism. But there is a lot more to perspectivism than discussions in philosophy of science so far have suggested. Perspectivism is a much broader view that emphasizes how our knowledge (in particular our scientific knowledge of nature) is situated; it is always from a human vantage point (as opposed to some Nagelian "view from nowhere"). This edited collection brings together a diverse team of established and early career scholars across a variety of fields (from the history of philosophy to epistemology and philosophy of science). The resulting nine essays trace some of the seminal ideas of perspectivism back to Kant, Nietzsche, the American Pragmatists, and Putnam, while the second part of the book tackles issues concerning the relation between perspectivism, relativism, and standpoint theories, and the implications of perspectivism for epistemological debates about veritism, epistemic normativity and the foundations of human knowledge.

• Perspectival realism
• Ernst Sosa on virtue perspectivism
• Conceptual relativism
• Standpoint epistemology
• Scientific understanding
• Explanatory perspectivism
• Putnam’s naturalism
• American Pragmatists on contextualism
• Nietzsche on perspectivism
• Kant on perspectivism
• anti-realism
• Nagelian
• Epistemic Circularity
• Putnam
• Critique of Pure Reason
• contextualism
• scientific knowledge of nature
• Carnap
• Open access

• School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

  Ana-Maria Crețu, Michela Massimi

Michela Massimi is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Edinburgh. She has extensively written in the area of history and philosophy of science. She was Co-Editor in Chief of The British Journal for Philosophy of Science (2011-2016), and she is currently the Vice President of the European Philosophy of Science Association. Michela is the PI on a ERC-funded project on Perspectival Realism. Science, Knowledge and Truth from a Human Vantage Point (2016-2020).