Прощай, COVID?

Iconic figures of modern philosophy seemed to us as if asking: what did you write during the quarantine, besides fifty Facebook comments and three posts? Perhaps it was a conscience. Rather, it was the very itch that Socrates describes in Plato’s “Philebus”.

The book you are holding is the product of this itch. It is unique for several reasons.

First, it gives a panoramic picture of the phenomenon that mankind encountered in the first half of 2020. In terms of the coverage of the plots given to us by the pandemic for observation and evaluation.

In terms of the scatter of points of view. And in terms of the focus and sharpness of the advanced estimates and proposed arguments.

Second, it is a multi-party book. If we can call SARS-CoV-2 a thing, then this is its full-fledged democratic parliament. The Russian intellectual space has long been marked by demarcation lines protecting the integrity and hermeticity of intellectual camps. “Goodbye COVID?” behaves as if these lines do not exist. Left, right, liberal, communist, statist, and anarchist points of view and argumentation systems are presented here on an equal footing.

And no, neither the world nor this book collapsed from an unexpected or even provocative neighborhood. On the contrary, they became more voluminous and enlightened.

Thirdly, as it seems to us, this book is a good example of how should work a conscious attitude toward those forms of inequality that have no place in science and academia. We are talking about gender, ranks, and merits, about the age and differences in academic statuses.

Absolute equality is still only a mathematical function, but we tried to get to it as close as was possible.

The collection consists of four sections. Choosing names for them we could not resist the temptation to play a game with the nomen of the virus that hit the world – SARS. To emphasize the inconceivable expressiveness of COVID-19, we used words of Esperanto, not live, not dead, not purely artificial, but not a natural language, the justification for the existence of which could confuse anyone, as well as the justification for the existence of a virus that is too perfect, to be a pure offspring of nature.

The Scio (Knowledge) section contains texts examining the problem of collision with COVID-19 through the prism of epistemology and speculative philosophy. Autonomeco (Autonomy) section presents this clash in the optics of personal ontological, existential and ethical experience.