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Displaying: 1-20 of 83 documents


special issue: philosophy in a time of pandemic
1. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Peg Birmingham, Ian Alexander Moore Philosophy in a Time of Pandemic: Introduction
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2. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Yuval Adler A Political a priori?
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This essay speculates on how variations in political attitudes—and in particular differences in perceptions of, and reactions to, the COVID-19 pandemic—might in fact be rooted in variations in our a priori conceptions of the thing and our understandings of the place of the human in the world.
3. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Alia Al-Saji Weariness: Dismembered Time, Colonialism, Pandemics
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Though fatigue appears a constant of this pandemic year, I argue that we may not all be living the same pandemic. I highlight the non-belonging of most racialized and colonized peoples to a world where flourishing is taken for granted as norm. To think this, I use the term “weariness.” I want to evoke, wearing out, wearing down, as well as the medical concept of weathering. Drawing on Césaire, Fanon, Hartman, Scott, and Spillers, my concept of weariness articulates an exhausting and enduring experience—the eroding, grating, and crumbling of racialized flesh—through repetitive colonial duration, not simply for a year, but over a longue durée. I read this as a wounding that needs to be thought not simply in terms of health outcomes and disease, but in terms of affective experience and dismembered possibility.
4. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Tongdong Bai The Pandemic’s Challenges to Liberal Democracy: From a Chinese Philosophy Perspective
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The -19 pandemic highlights the following problems: the balance between the private and the public within a liberal framework; the merits and the limits of a liberal democracy in governance; and the inadequacy of a nation-states-led global order. In light of these problems, I will offer some Confucian alternatives.
5. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Andrew Benjamin Solidarity, Populism and COVID-19: Working Notes
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The presence of COVID-19 has elicited a range of philosophical responses. The aim of this paper is to engage with the position advanced by Giorgio Agamben. Part of the critique of Agamben involves critique of populism. In response to populism the paper advances a different philosophical position this time ground in the concept of solidarity. The work of Hannah Arendt provides the basis for this response.
6. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Françoise Dastur Questions on the Present State of the World
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Philosophy cannot alone change the present state of the world, the role of the philosopher being only to question and help to arouse a true awareness of what is happening in the world. The current pandemic should therefore incite the philosophers to make the Europeanization of the planet their main question.
7. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Graham Harman Concerning the COVID-19 Event
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This article focuses on Alain Badiou’s surprisingly moderate response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is shown that his dismissal of the virus as a familiar problem best dealt with by bureaucratic managers stems from an overly idealist approach to one of his key philosophical topics: the event.
8. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Wolfgang Heuer Cosmos, Worlds and Republics: Notes on the Occasion of the COVID-19 Pandemic
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Viruses and pandemics are part of an overarching ecological theme that encompasses not only climate and plants, but all forms and conditions of life. This requires a far-reaching change in perspective. Not only does biodiversity, following Alexander von Humboldt, form a common “cosmos” across the globe, but we humans are also part of it. This natural sphere corresponds to Arendt’s concept of the “world” on the social and political sphere. Cosmos and world take the place of the old irreconcilable separation of nature/barbarism and culture/civilization. Consequently, the threat to cosmos and world does not come from nature but from man-made devastation. Biodiversity and human plurality can only thrive with the principles of environmental/political sustainability.
9. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Cressida J. Heyes The Short and the Long of It: A Political Phenomenology of Pandemic Time
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Drawing on Françoise Dastur’s suggestion that the event is a permanent possibility that shapes lived experience, but also, when it occurs, a distinctive temporal rupture, I argue that the initial weeks of the COVID-19 epidemic constitute an event, in her sense. Connecting this phenomenological point to literatures on the politics of temporality, I suggest that the distinction between event and normal experience maps to that between epidemic and endemic. Understanding some of the political and ethical erasures of death and debility in COVID times can thus be mutually informed by phenomenological analysis.
10. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Yuk Hui Philosophy and the Planetary
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This essay considers the pandemic as a consequence of the planetary condition. It goes on to ask: Can philosophy contribute to the elucidation of the planetary, or is philosophy, in the words of Heidegger, already completed in and as the planetary? What kind of relation to the planetary will it desire to have?
11. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Lode Lauwaert, Andreas De Block Beware of the Philosophical Expert
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Many philosophers and lay people believe that philosophy has an important role to play in times of societal crisis. In this contribution reasons are given to doubt the supposed societal relevance of philosophy.
12. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
James Martel The Magic of Matter: Bodies, Together and Apart in a Time of Pandemic
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I look at what Walter Benjamin calls the “magic of matter,” a silent form of communication between material objects, including our bodies. This communion exists even when bodies are separated as they are during the pandemic and becomes especially sensible to us when the physical presence of others is removed.
13. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Eduardo Mendieta Antinomies of a Pandemic: Lady Philosophy in Blue Plastic Gloves
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The essay considers three classic definitions of philosophy, namely those offered by Socrates, Boethius, as semantically enriched by Montaigne, and Kant, in order to reflected on individual and collective death. Kant’s philosophical tool of the antinomies of reason is deployed to think through the antinomies of our pandemic in order to make clear that in a pandemic there is only collective, and not individual or even national, inoculation. The false dichotomies of physical versus social, embodiment versus virtuality, nationalism versus planetarization, and propaganda versus science, are discussed. Lady philosophy appears wearing blue plastic gloves.
14. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Thomas Nail Philosophy in the Time of COVID
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The COVID world is just like it was before, only more so. Every problem that already existed is worse. What can philosophy do in such a world? I think there are at least two opportunities for philosophy today. The first is that philosophers can seize this historical moment to intervene in almost every sector of social, political, and ethical life. The second unique opportunity I think philosophers have is to create new concepts in response to new phenomena. New events call for new ways of thinking and being that change our world-view. COVID is not just an amplification of existing power structures. It has also changed our relationship to and awareness of the importance of social and viral mobilities. Might the concept of “motion” offer us a new perspective on the world?
15. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Johanna Oksala Philosophy in a Time of Pandemic
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Philosophy in a time of a pandemic should insist that it is critically important to get to the root causes of the pandemic, and not merely react to its symptoms. The ultimate reason for this pandemic is our relentless destruction of nature and the merciless exploitation of animals.
16. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Kelly Oliver Whose New Normal?: The Ruse and the Hope of “We’re all in this together”
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Belying the rhetoric of “We’re all in this together,” and “COVID as the great equalizer,” the pandemic has brought into focus the “pre-existing conditions” of inequality—poverty, racism, lack of health care, lack of child care, women’s double burden, and the vulnerability of the elderly, among others. The coronavirus reveals gaping inequities in the length and quality of life caused by social and economic “pre-existing conditions.” It is the great unequalizer, the promise and ruse of “We’re all in this together.” The new normal for some, is the old normal for many others.
17. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback To Think in the Eye of the Storm
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The article aims to reflect on the pandemic from the situatedness of being in the eye of the storm. It discusses the contagion between biological and digital viralization, and the politics and existential effects of the pandemic non-touching.
18. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Dimitris Vardoulakis The Three Apples: Agonistic Democracy in the Age of Calculation
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From the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11, agonistic democracy promised to navigate away from both liberalism and dialectical materialism. How can we renew that discourse to highlight its significance in the times of COVID-19? I answer this question by looking at three articulations of the apple metaphor.
19. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Santiago Zabala Imagining a Philosophy of Warnings for Our Greatest Emergency
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In order to understand the essence of COVID-19 pandemic, it is necessary to take a step back and question the hierarchy of emergency in relation to other emergencies that are not addressed. This will also allow us to imagine a “philosophy of warnings” capable to interpret absent emergencies.
20. Philosophy Today: Volume > 64 > Issue: 4
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek Triple Pandemics: COVID-19, Anti-Black Violence, and Digital Capitalism
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This essay diagnoses systemic interconnections between COVID-19 pandemics, anti-Black racism, and the intensification of digital capitalism. By drawing on Charles Mills’ rectificatory justice and Hannah Arendt’s reflections on understanding and action, it argues that the role of philosophy lies in safeguarding racial justice and understanding against the hegemony algorithmic governmentality.