Introduction: Humanity and disease discourse

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. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.

Global health, humanity and the COVID-19 pandemic: Philosophical and sociological challenges and imperatives

This volume interrogates global health and especially the scourge of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the role that science has played in mitigating the human experiences of pandemics and health over the centuries. Science, and the scientific method, has always been at the forefront of the human attempt at undermining the virulent consequences of sicknesses and diseases. However, the scientific image of humans in the world is founded on the presumption of possessing the complete understanding about humans and their physiological and psychological frameworks. This volume challenges this scientific assumption. Global health denotes the complex and cumulative health profile of humanity that involves not only the framework of scientific researches and practices that investigates and seeks to improve the health of all people on the globe, but also the range of humanistic issues - economic, cultural, social, ideological - that constitute the sources of inequities and threat to the achievement of a positive global health profile. This volume balances the argument that diseases and pandemics are human problems that demand both scientific and humanistic interventions. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.