"If you ask him a question about something and he talks about his viewpoint, he also talks about the opposing viewpoint, shows where it came from, what value it could have," Hancock says.
Richard Driehaus, however, a wealthy and influential lover of the lush neo-Classicism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is doing what he can to counteract a viewpoint he thinks is leading to a less interesting city.
"He relished the fact that he had a viewpoint that wasn't everybody else's viewpoint — he was not above saying things solely for being provocative," said a dorm mate and friend, Christopher Beha, a novelist and an associate editor at Harper's Magazine.
He visited just about everybody whose viewpoint he might absorb without necessarily asking for an opinion.
Grévy served in the Constituent Assembly of 1848 where, fearing the rise of Louis-Napoléon (later Emperor Napoleon III), he advocated a weak executive, a viewpoint he held throughout his career.
Today the company's artistic profile remains dominated by Balanchine's aesthetic, which he did not express as a universal viewpoint: he never said that his ballets represented what all ballets should be.
In many Ruscha pictures, you are looking down on something — an oblique viewpoint he has favored ever since he saw, on his first trip abroad, John Everett Millais's painting of the drowned Ophelia at the Tate, in London.
At the beginning of the discussion, he seems to support Maimonides' viewpoint, but he continues the discussion with the assumption that he cannot definitely rule out Nahmanides' approach, which is supported by sources from kabbalistic literature.
Because he's so assured of the veracity of whatever difficult viewpoint he's taking that you just kind of have to accept it and carry on.
He also doesn't make much case for how the viewpoint he proposes makes a blind bit of difference to anyone who is not a cosmologist.
He says he "didn't go into many of these questions with any particular attachment" or viewpoint he was hoping to prove or disprove.
