I’ve been building up to writing a book about perspective and perspectivism for about ten years now. I’ve read articles and books and written thousands of words in emails (mostly to myself) and other places. (It doesn’t pay to rush these things.) 

This isn’t about perspective in the artistic sense — how painters make a two-dimensional surface look three-dimensional — although that’s a related idea or practice. This is about perspective in the sense of a point of view or frame of reference or standpoint. It’s what we mean when we say “that’s your perspective” or “this is where I’m coming from”. Similarly, it’s what we mean by statements like “she’s speaking from a scientific perspective” or “it’s a bad decision from an ethical perspective”.

Perspectivism is a philosophical view about the importance of perspective when it comes to subjects like science or ethics, but also the way perspective functions in everyday life. This view is associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, but other philosophers have had similar ideas, including some academic philosophers working today. There is even a website devoted to “perspectival realism” funded by a European Union research program.

Understanding Perspectivism features essays by twelve academics. It’s not going to make the New York Times bestseller list. Putting aside the subject matter and the fairly technical language, that’s guaranteed by the price of a hardcover copy: $140. Rather oddly, however, anyone interested can download it free (which is how, no surprise, I got mine).

If you want to know more, there’s a positive account of the book at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. I’ll quote a bit that gives a feel for the collection’s subject matter and style:

Another standout [chapter] is David Danks’ “Safe-and-Substantive Perspectivism” which presents a view refreshingly unique from all other chapters. . . . Danks does what philosophers do best and takes a step back, thinking about perspectivism from a broader perspective. He works to dig in to just where and how perspectives enter into science and draws a useful distinction between two extremes: ‘unsafe’ hyperlocal perspectivism and ‘insubstantial’ high-level perspectivism. The former refers to the notion that perspectives set the basis for science at the level of individual scientists, which may be “dependent on local, contingent properties of specific people”. The latter refers to an opposite notion that scientific perspectives are highly abstract and general human activities — a notion that Danks deems uninformative regarding the nature of scientific perspectives.

To that end, Danks offers an alternative that construes science as necessarily and unproblematically perspectival. Here the big picture is that perspectives aren’t unique to science, and consequently aren’t any more of a problem for science than they are for any other domain where there are multiple, often incompatible perspectives, such as general human perception:

“More precisely, these sources of perspectivism are not unique to scientific theories, knowledge, and beliefs but rather apply to their everyday counterparts. That is, there is nothing special (with respect to these arguments) about science, and so the resulting perspectivism about science does not threaten a collapse into complete relativism (or at least, poses no more threat than we face about all of our beliefs and knowledge).”