Philosophy and social commitment
GCAS Review Journal
Vol. II, Issue 1/2025
Editor: Filippo Scafi
INTRODUCTION
This introductive essay explores the paradox of writing at the very origin of philosophy: Plato’s decision to inscribe dialogues while condemning writing as inhuman. The dialogues emerge not as treatises but as staged conversations that dramatize the impossibility of transmitting pure thought. Read through the lenses of noise, writing, and containment, they appear as fragile vessels that metabolize confusion into meaning while always leaking their own limits. At stake is a broader question that resonates today: how can philosophy transmit across difference and crisis without reducing alterity to doctrine or abandoning universality to relativism?
Dialogue, Containment, and Planetary Philosophy, by Filippo Scafi
THEORY, PRAXIS, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Between theory and practice lies a space of impasse—where action risks superficiality and thought risks detachment. The essays gathered here propose psychoanalysis as a privileged site to rethink this relation: a political space where interpretation itself becomes transformative. They also reflect on the psychic toll of living in a world saturated with violence, asking whether paralysis, listening, and fragility can themselves constitute forms of protest and care.
Why won’t the philosopher go to therapy? Psychoanalysis at the end of the world, by Rishab Nathan
I Can’t Think Today: The Crisis of the Reflective Subject, by Shaifila Ladhani
Spiritual Misery and the Absence of Experience: Towards a Political and Poetic Psychoanalysis, by Carlos Padrón
The Problem of Continental Philosophy, by Lee Nok’si Livingston
UNIVERSALITY, PLURALISM, AND CARE
What philosophy is possible after the collapse of universalism? These contributions imagine a practice of thought grounded not in the ambition to speak for all, but in fractured universality, epistemic humility, and care. Drawing on decolonial, cosmopolitical, and therapeutic perspectives, the section envisions philosophy as a diplomatic practice of listening, hosting encounters, and cultivating collective responsibility in a plural world.
Fractured Universality: Toward a Philosophy That Listens Without Speaking For, by Bridget K Hayes
A Diplomatic Philosophy for the Cosmopolitical World, by David Antolinez
Crisis as Determinate Negation: A Hegelian Response to Planetary Catastrophe, by Robert P. Rozek
CLOSURE
This contribution, blending ethnographical methodology and philosophical analysis, reflects on the interviews with the contributors to the Call for Paper, shifting attention from theoretical architectures to their lived enactments. By moving from infrastructure to interface, it proposes a space where theory listens to its own conditions of transmission and reorients itself against itself. Blending anthropological investigation with philosophical discussion, it opens a hybrid terrain where theory is tested through the practices and voices that sustain it.