How Have Philosophers Responded to the Pandemic?

In this Al Jazeera article, Spanish philosopher Santiago Zabala analyzes how contemporary philosophers have interpreted the COVID-19 pandemic as a systemic, rather than purely biomedical, crisis. He critiques dominant policy responses for their technocratic narrowness and argues that the pandemic exposes the failures of extractive capitalism, environmental neglect, and the commodification of life. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek, Zabala frames the crisis as an opportunity to reimagine political structures—including a possible reinvention of communism—and to confront global inequality and ecological collapse.

Bruno Latour extends this analysis, linking the pandemic to planetary ecological disruption and calling for a radical redefinition of political community to include non-human actors. Both thinkers suggest that the pandemic foregrounds the entanglement of human and ecological systems and requires an epistemic shift toward political ecology. Zabala ultimately positions philosophers as vital interlocutors in rethinking global futures. This article thus reframes the pandemic as a philosophical and ecological event. It contributes a meta-critical lens that interrogates dominant narratives and locates the pandemic within broader global crises.