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Sunday, March 29, 2020

Wars, Epidemics, and Philosophy

The philosophy of the past consists of the unhappy reactions to the post-war and post-epidemic distress that the philosophers have encountered. The Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian philosophy can be seen as an outcome of the anti-establishment thinking that was catalyzed by the distress that Ancient Athens was put through after its defeat in the Peloponnesian War. The philosophy of the late middle ages and the early modern period carries the mark of the multiple plague epidemics, which wiped out more than half the population in many parts of Europe. I believe that the present pandemic might spawn a philosophical thought that is significantly different from the philosophical trends of the last fifty years.

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