https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/PHIL5201?type=COREThe course aims at a critical reflection on objectivity. We will discuss what objectivity is, how different notions of it evolved historically, how it relates to truth, and how society, politics and sciences should connect to objectivity. With this, we will also study how different conceptions of objectivity evolved historically. Many philosophers acknowledge that objectivity is an epistemic virtue, but most ignore that the concept of objectivity has a history. Objectivity repeatedly changed its meaning, in particular from what the historians Daston and Galison (2010) call "truth to nature," to "mechanical objectivity," to "structural objectivity" and "trained judgment." This course in historical epistemology studies the history of objectivity. It aims to explore the relevance of objectivity for our contemporary notions of knowledge, representation and presentation, realism and naturalism, the knowing self, epistemic virtues, the ethos of science, and the societies that relate to these. In the first part of the course, we will focus on the "epistemologies of the eye" (as Daston and Galison call it), i.e., the history of objectivity in contexts of visual (re-)presentations as part of observational sciences.