Mary Midgley, Covid-19, and That Beastly Illusion

The paper begins with a retrospective of the debates on the origin of life: the virus or the cell? The virus needs a cell for replication, instead the cell is a more evolved form on the evolutionary scale of life. In addition, the study of viruses raises pressing conceptual and philosophical questions about their nature, their classification, and their place in the biological world. The subject of pandemics is approached starting from the existentialism of Albert Camus and Sartre, the replacement of the exclusion ritual with the disciplinary mechanism of Michel Foucault, and about the Gaia hypothesis, developed by James Lovelock and supported in the current pandemic by Bruno Latour. The social dimensions of pandemics, their connection to global warming, which has led to an increase in infectious diseases, and the deforestation of large areas, which have caused viruses to migrate from their native area (their "reservoir") are highlighted below. The ethics of pandemics is ap...

Covid-19 global pandemic is no doubt the most global public health challenge facing humanity today. it has disrupted economies, social services and even political arrangements. With no quick solution at hand to address Covid-19 apart from preventive measures such as wearing face masks, sanitizers and social distance, the questions in many people's minds is what next. I propose a holistic approach to Covid-19 that will look at this global pandemic from philosophical, theological and political economic dimensions without neglecting the medical aspect.

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2021

The role of a journal like HPLS during the novel coronavirus pandemic should serve as a means for scholars in different fields and professions to consider historically and critically what is happening as it unfolds. Surely it cannot tackle all the possible issues related to the pandemic, in particular to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it does have a responsibility to foster the best possible dialogue about the various issues related to the history and philosophy of the life sciences, and thus to solicit contributions from potential authors working in different parts of the world and belonging to different cultural traditions. Only a real plurality of perspectives should allow for a better, large-scale comprehension of what the COVID-19 pandemic is. Keywords COVID-19 • Global pandemic and the life sciences • Historical and philosophical studies of the novel coronavirus

Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020

On the second weekend of March 2020, just before the Canada-wide lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic was made official, we realized that we needed to take a snapshot of rapid changes that were unfolding around us. The biopolitical dimensions of public health and governmental responses to the pandemic were already clear, so we contacted Canadian-based scholars working in field of biopolitics to contribute short, rapid-response essays on the first, early stage of the pandemic. The editors at TOPIA and the University of Toronto Press graciously agreed to publish the essays online (Bird and Ironstone, 2020). In less than a week, 10 essays covering various biopolitical dimensions of the first week of the lockdown in Canada were published. The first volume, COVID-19 Essays, was written in the middle of March 2020, at exactly the moment when pandemic measures were being operationalized and the new pandemic discourse took on dramatic intensity in Canada. The short essays published then reflect the pandemic moment in which they appeared. On the one hand, critical engagement was tempered by pessimistic premonitions, much like Agamben's (2020a, 2020b), as our contributors recognized that our pandemic moment would be shaped by decades of neoliberal restructuring and would provide the justification of further extensions of governmental power into the everyday lives of people. On the other hand, our contributors expressed hope for new or renewed forms of social solidarity in which the stakes of life and death revealed during a public health crisis might inspire care, community and con-viviality. Even with the incursion of complex social processes of pandemicization, the contributors argued, profound transformation and an ethos of care was also possible. Attention could be directed not simply to self-protection and preservation , but also to social transformation and enhancement where the conditions of life and living-captured, controlled, regulated and, as the pandemic made clear, unequally distributed-might be reconfigured. There were two paths that might be travelled, and which would win out was not clear. Months into the pandemic, it is still unclear.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice

Social Work, 2020

cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics, 2022

International Conference "Left Theory for the 21st Century – II", Athens, 14-15 January, 2021

The current global health crisis puts on the agenda the fundamental opposition between nature and society. According to the naïve, scientistic explication of the pandemic, the virus represents a malicious natural force that severely threatens social life. Human society fights back with the enlightened power of science, which will finally prevail. This is the medical interpretation of the crisis. Against it a “critical” reading of the situation is developed, which one-sidedly stresses its cultural representation and bio-political administration: The pandemic as a social construction. However the dialectical understanding of the pandemic must combine both approaches in a unity that contextualizes it within the permanent ecological, economic and political crisis of globalized capitalism.

Phronimon

A discursive canon around transhumanism and posthumanism as beliefs in the efficacy and necessity of technology as the beneficial transformer of human life “for the better” is well-established in the Western philosophical tradition. However, none of the theorists and protagonists of this technological reconfiguration of humanity could ever have predicted that what they envisaged would be propelled into manifestation with as dramatic and phenomenal momentum such as has been ushered in by the mainly technology-driven interventions introduced in various measures globally to curb the SARS-CoV2 virus. The effect of these responses to the pandemic, it is here demonstrated, have set humanity into a technogenesis, a transformative ontological process headed towards a machinistic and de-anthropic life idealised by posthumanists. Apropos, a set of three intertwined tasks are here executed. Firstly, I explicate my foregoing claim, namely, how at the helm of the variety of measures to control C...