Alterity

Alterity, alternatively called otherness, is a philosophical concept derived from the Latin word alter, which means the other. Both the philosophical and the sociological approaches to alterity were built in narrow relation to identity around the binary opposition of self versus other (ego and alter), which remains constitutive for human society. Even if the sociological approaches to alterity are relatively new, the concept of alterity is as old as the history of humankind. On the one hand, alterity was a central preoccupation of many phenomenological thinkers, starting from the assumption that the other represents someone or something not comprehensible to the self, that is, the other cannot be interpreted in any way on the basis of the categories of human understanding. On the other hand, ...