The term alterity derives from the Latin word alter, which means "other." In contemporary philosophy the question of the other is primarily that of the other human being, the Other (Autrui, in French), although some thinkers have raised the question of whether the human other should be privileged in this way. However, the central question governing philosophical discussions of alterity is not that of who the other is, but that of our access to alterity. So-called continental philosophy highlights the ontological dimension of this question rather than its epistemological dimension, which was the focus in English-speaking philosophy of what, since the nineteenth century, has been called the problem of other minds.

In his Cartesian Meditations (1960 [1931]) Edmund Husserl offers an account of how, by an analogy with my own body, I recognize another body as organic and, by a kind of alienation in which I make myself other that...