Epidemics, pandemics, contagion, immunity, social distance, zoonosis are just a few of the concepts that have become commonplace in the academic community and in everyday conversation since the outbreak of the Covid-19. This book aims to provide the reader with a philosophical guide to this conceptual vocabulary by investigating the meanings, implications, and history of words related to the current emergency of Covid-19.
This book addresses the fundamental anthropological, ethical, and political issues that have come under the spotlight of the public debate (life and death, freedom and authority, fear and protection, poverty and access to medical care). In this context, particular attention is given to the conflict between the scientific discourse on the one hand, and irrational bias, misinformation and fake news on the other.
The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak is only the latest episode in a long history of pandemics and epidemics that have constellated human history since its very beginning. Authoritative accounts have made some of these contagious plagues famous (Thucydides’ pages immortalizing the Athenian epidemic of the 5th century B.C.; Boccaccio’s description of the Black Death; Manzoni’s depiction of the Plague ravaging 17th-century Milan). Because a full understanding of the present is not possible without historical inquiry, several contributions in the book explore debates about calamitous phenomena as documented in philosophical literature from Antiquity to 20th-century philosophy.
Alesandro Palazzo and Michele Nicoletti are Professors at the Department of Humanities, University of Trento
From Conclusion (pag. 321-326)
[...] As said in the introduction, pandemics and epidemics are complex phenomena. Even though they first and foremost involve medical issues, pandemics and epidemics cannot be viewed only from the perspective of biomedical management of disease (cure, prevention, diagnosis, prognosis, etc.). As they are general health crises, they affect human life on many levels (psychological, ecological, religious, social, economic, political, etc.). Accordingly, to adequately understand these phenomena, a multi-perspective and interdisciplinary approach is required that makes use of the methods and concepts of the most important human and social sciences. The papers collected in this volume show that philosophy, with the variety of its fields, styles, and notions, can also make a decisive contribution to this analysis. As such, this volume signals the need for new comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and cross-cultural studies with a strong philosophical background.
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From a strictly philosophical point of view, it would be interesting to analyze how epidemics/pandemics relate to the concept of state of emergency from both a theoretical and a historical perspective: in other words, does the social devastation triggered by epidemics/pandemics fall into the conceptual category of state of emergency? And in theorizing this concept, have philosophers also been influenced by their experience or knowledge of the social impact of epidemics and pandemics? By focusing on fear and dispossession as two widespread psychological effects of the COVID-19 crisis, Michele Nicoletti’s paper can be read as an attempt to interpret the recent pandemic outbreak and its social impact through the framework of the state of emergency.The social impact and political management of epidemics/pandemics have been the focus of philosophical investigations in the past. In one of his courses at the Collège de France (Les anormaux), Michel Foucault theorized the existence of two antithetical social dispositives of power and control of individuals devised in the Middle Ages to manage the emergencies posed by epidemics: the ‘leprosy model’, based on the isolation of lepers from the rest of society and their physical seclusion outside the city, and the ‘plague model’, based on the inclusion of plague-stricken people through a pervasive system of checks and control of their lives. Foucault’s analyses prove insightful and pave the way for further research into the ways in which, over the centuries, epidemics and pandemics and the processes elicited by health crises have impacted political thinking by contributing to the formation of new conceptual models.
The papers in the historical section of the volume, which revolve around the problem of the etiology of epidemics (especially plague pandemics) and the mechanisms of transmission, contribute to problematizing the simplifying commonplace view that the Galenic miasma theory was the only explanation of the pathogenesis of the epidemics advanced in the Antiquity and the Middle Ages up until the bacteriological breakthrough of the nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, the intellectual landscape was much more diverse, with contagionist models being already adopted in ancient and medieval sources. Explanations based on contagion were sometimes variously mixed with miasma theories. Future research should seek to provide a systematic analysis of the actual role played by contagion in ancient and medieval medical, historical, and literary sources.
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The historical analysis contained in the first part of the volume highlighted the set of words, concepts, and theories that, over the centuries, philosophy has elaborated to describe and interpret the phenomenon of epidemics and pandemics. This impressive linguistic, conceptual, and theoretical armamentarium has been able to sediment itself over the centuries and survive the vitality of the scientific theories that were intended to explain these phenomena. The extraordinary development of medical and epidemiological science has falsified a large number of past hypotheses, but the vocabulary of the pandemic has demonstrated, in the crisis produced by the worldwide spread of COVID-19, its incredible resilience.Not only that. As the analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture already showed, this vocabulary has remained alive in the medical sciences, but has also found application in the most diverse sectors of social and cultural life. The concepts of ‘contagion’ and ‘immunisation’, to take two examples already mentioned, are the clearest demonstration of this. Not only do descriptions of natural and social reality make ample use of it, but also the vocabularies of virtual reality amply attest to it.
In short, the language of the pandemic has gone ‘viral’ and it would certainly be interesting to understand to what this vitality can be attributed. It certainly depends on at least two factors. Firstly, medicine has progressively become the ‘spiritual’ centre of reference of the contemporary era, a new religion bringing salvation, whose prescriptions have been able to impose themselves — as the COVID experience has shown — over the prescriptions of traditional religions. Secondly, the pandemic is an incredibly intense and widespread experience of fear, and it is not surprising that its vocabulary remains engraved in human consciousness through the ages and retains a formidable evocative power.
In this sense, the essays in the second part of the volume also open up fascinating avenues of research. The theme of zoonosis — the focus of Carlo Brentari’s essay — evokes the very ancient and topical issue of the relationship between human beings and other living beings, particularly those in the animal world. The clash with the pandemic not only evokes the conflict between life and death, but also that between human life and other life forms. The virus is a living being, itself living in other living beings and carried by other living beings. In the age of the anthropocene, of the unchallenged dominance of the human species over other living forms, the dialectic between human and non-human life is reopened. The fear of the ‘beasts’ that has accompanied human life for millennia and inhabited its imagination, pushing human beings to conceive of themselves as ‘other’ than the animal being, seen in turn as a past and as a limit to be overcome, is once again taking shape.
Alongside this, another dialectic is reopened, that between ‘wild’ life and domestication, calling into question the agricultural model that emerged from the Neolithic period and forged the food and daily life of the past millennia. [...] The pandemic not only reopens the game of relations between living species, but also the game of the environment, since an overly humanised environment can be a relevant element in the spread of contagion. The conceptual constellations of miasma theory and germ theory intertwine again in the present.
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The theme of the equality of human beings, called into question by COVID and its management, is also touched upon by Nidesh Lawtoo’s essay, which reinterprets the issue of contagion on the basis of a reinterpretation of mimetic theory in the digital age. If on the one hand the experience of the pandemic unites the entire human species because everyone can be affected by it (‘the eternal ethos of the plague’), on the other hand it is clear that it can trigger new processes of discrimination, particularly through unequal access to health care and vaccines. Moreover, the spread of the virus has brought with it profound transformations in the public arena. If this — with the advent of the masses in the twentieth century — was already marked by the ‘metaphorical’ dynamic of the contagion of crowds and the spread of conspiracy theories, now, because of the ‘real’ contagion, these phenomena are also amplified thanks to the power of the new media. This opens up the question of how to react to false theories and pathological practices. Is it sufficient to reaffirm the role of rationality and scientific knowledge or is a new ‘pathos’ of human coexistence needed?It is difficult to underestimate the importance of the transformations of human communication in the pandemic and the questions they bring. Starting with interpersonal communication, COVID was a dramatic experience. The practices of estrangement and forced distancing marked personal existences. The compulsory wearing of masks altered non-verbal communication, which is a fundamental element of human interaction. The explosion of distant communication practices thanks to digital technologies has altered personal communication, but also social communication. [...] As Ľudmila Lacková shows in her essay, all communication has become ‘mediated’ and she thus asks how this hegemony of mediation will affect the crisis of the subject.
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Courtesy by Brepols