Philosophy Today

DOI: 10.5840/philtoday2020113360

Philosophy in a Time of Pandemic:

Introduction
PEG BIRMINGHAM AND IAN ALEXANDER MOORE

I
n April 2020, amid massive shutdowns and global panic, we invited our
editorial board and a few other philosophers to respond, in no more
than 2,000 words each, to the following questions: What is the role of
philosophy in a time of pandemic? What questions is philosophy uniquely ca-
pable of posing and addressing? What ought philosophers to be thinking about
or engaging in today? What implications does the pandemic have for philosophy
in the present or perhaps for philosophy as such?
We received numerous replies from a variety of perspectives. Contributors
argue, for example, that philosophy should safeguard the principles of justice and
understanding, provoke and articulate calls for revolutionary change, seize the
moment to draw attention to crises that were here long before the pandemic and
will be with us long afterward, articulate the underlying structures that dominate
political orientations, and generate new conceptual tools for the present and the
future. Philosophy should question moral certainties and simple oppositions,
without, however, being too quick to provide solutions, especially at the level
of policy. Perhaps the most important thing to be learned is that the pandemic
should not be examined in isolation. The articles in this special issue bring a wide
range of topics to bear on our ability to begin to understand the significance of
COVID-19, including systemic racism, global capitalism, biopolitical governance,
environmental degradation, and computational transformation, to name just a few.
If the owl of Minerva takes wing only at dusk, we would seem, at present, to
be quite far from twilight, let alone the advent of a new dawn. In the meantime,
we hope that the following reflections will provide you with some insight into our
impoverished times and with new ways to think about and respond to them. They
have certainly done so for us.
Peg Birmingham, DePaul University
Ian Alexander Moore, St. John’s College

© Philosophy Today, Volume 64, Issue 4 (Fall 2020).

ISSN 0031-8256 813