Nicole Note – författare

Globalization brings people and cultures together, producing, in addition to deep and rich encounters, exclusion, racism, xenophobia and asymmetries. The present book takes these issues implicitly as its starting point by thoroughly reflecting on them from a perspective of worldviews, as one of many approaches.

More specifically, it focuses on people’s implicit and explicit interpretations and assumptions of the world, of themselves and of others. Often deeply rooted and hard to change, they have an important function, for without them we would continually need to question what we do and what we think. In their absolutist form, these assumptions may become a barrier for open-mindedness, and hence for deep intercultural understanding and exchange. We need to find a balance between both stances.

Intercultural philosophy tries to fulfil this role, on the one hand by comparing different cultures on a deep philosophical level, and as a way to better understand each other’s core assumptions, and on the other hand by arguing for an intercultural philosophy grounded in specific cases. The contributions of this book conceive of "another possible world" which does not condemn cultural and religious diversity as a detonator for "Clashes of Civilizations", but rather welcomes it as a source of inspiration for all and of respect for the "different".

In this book the editors brought together outstanding articles concerning intercultural aesthetics. The concept ‘Intercultural aesthetics’ creates a home space for an artistic cross-fertilization between cultures, and for heterogeneity, but it is also firmly linked with the intercultural turn within Western and non-Western philosophy.

The book is divided into two parts, yet one can sense a clear unity throughout the whole book. This unity is related to the underlying subject that the different authors, each in their own way and from their own background, try to reveal. They use related, and overlapping terms such as ‘the suchness of things’, ‘dancing and shaping lives’, ‘presenting a meaning beyond words, presenting the unpresentable, experiencing’, in order to bring to our awareness the genuine importance of the non-conceptual, next to the conceptual. Several authors moreover take on a reflective, and at times even a self-reflective stance, pointing to the intrinsic relation between cultural aesthetics and ethics, making this book unique in its kind.