Abstract
The introduction grounds the understanding of the relationship between humanity and pandemics. Starting from the legitimating of science during the Enlightenment, and tracing its consolidation through the evolution of scientism, the chapter outlines how science and scientific understanding of the world came to dominate human epistemological interaction with the universe. However, this positivistic understanding of the scientific image of the human becomes grossly inadequate within the context of a pandemic, like the COVID-19, that unravels the entire dimensions of humanity, from the physiological to the psychological and from sociological to the moral. This chapter outlines some of the critical issues that the pandemic raised, including racial inequalities, the fake news predicament, the relationship between science and non-science, the nature of scientific truth, and the relationship between science and politics—issues that all the chapters in the volume interrogate in interdisciplinary concert.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
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Notes
- 1.
By the “original” image, Sellars means a framework of reckoning, before the gradual unfolding of civilization, within which all objects are perceived as persons and all kinds of objects constitute ways of being persons. “This means that the sort of things that are said of objects in this framework are the sort of things that are said of persons” (ibid.: 478). However, the refinement of this original image, which Sellars calls the “manifest” image, is characterized, with the advancement of civilization, by the “de-personalization” of all objects other than persons.
- 2.
Indeed, Habermas argues that scientism makes possible the effacement of epistemology for the emergence of scientific knowledge. In other words, “Positivism is philosophical only insofar as is necessary for the immunization of the sciences against philosophy” (ibid.: 67).
- 3.
In April 2020, two French doctors, Dr Jean-Paul Mira and Camille Locht, the research director for France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research, stirred ideological controversy when they suggested that the BCG tuberculosis vaccine that was about to enter into trials as a potential treatment for COVID-19 be tested in Africa, “where there are no [face]masks, no treatments and no ICUs.” Even though the suggestion was met with a swift and angry global reaction (the director-general of WHO saw it as “a hangover from a colonial mentality”), the doctors’ suggestion coheres with a historical trajectory that takes Africa and the rest of the developing third world as an experimentation laboratory.
- 4.
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Egbokhare, F., Afolayan, A. (2023). Introduction: Humanity and Disease Discourse. In: Egbokhare, F., Afolayan, A. (eds) Global Health, Humanity and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17429-2_1
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