Fellow - Collegium de Lyon (Institut for Advanced Study)

The research on vulnerability have mainly been focused on human vulnerability, and before the pandemic broke out, only the “human subject” was estimated as vulnerable because of his/her exposure to “Other”. When we talked about economy or politics, we used above all the word “crisis” and never “vulnerability”. On the contrary, the unprecedented experience we have gone through because of COVID-19 has brought us face to face with an inescapable fact: vulnerability is not only a human trait but it can characterise any living system and any dimension illustrating the human as such. Philosophy can help to clarify this situation, at least if it does not bound itself to the description of vulnerability but if it aims at the elucidation of other vulnerabilities. However, how can philosophy do this? The stake of this project is to show that philosophy can do it by exercising itself as a phenomenological-hermeneutical method applied to different topics, such as environment, economics, and politics.