Miljana Milojevic

In her essay, “Global Knowledge Frameworks and the Tasks of Cross-Cultural Philosophy,” Leigh Jenco proposes that certain knowledge frameworks may, in virtue of their accessibility to erstwhile outsiders, be more congenial to the aims of cross-cultural philosophy. Her co-symposiasts use Jenco’s essay to further the discussion on different aspects of this claim. Steve Fuller contests whether postcolonialism is the right lens through which cross-cultural encounters should be studied. David H. Kim suggests that an inclusive multifactorial account of frameworks relevant to cross-cultural philosophy may be more apt for the aims of this sub-discipline. Thaddeus Metz seeks to provide reason to doubt Jenco’s self-transformative conception, and also advance another, pluralist conception of knowledge. Miljana Milojevic reinterprets Jenco’s knowledge frameworks as different conceptualizations of knowledge used in attempts to justify the neglect of non-Western traditions.

In this paper I aim to offer one novel perspective on the effects of physical and social isolation on an individual in the period of COVID-19 pandemic. Namely, we can distinguish two standard approaches to studying such effects: psychological, which strives to identify emergence and effects of new external stressors on an individual, and legal and ethical, which evaluates justification and correctness of certain public strategies designed to combat the pandemic that jeopardize human rights, such as the right to freedom of movement. The novel perspective, offered in this paper, should not replace any of these approaches, instead it will provide some amendments to them by putting in place a new theoretical framework. The focus of the paper will be on justifying two major assumptions of this novel approach – the assumption that individuals as cognitive systems and selves sometimes extend into the environment, and the assumption that this environment can be social, i.e. that individuals sometimes extend on cognitive resources of other people. If these assumptions can be well founded, some psychological effects of isolation could be reconceptualized as instances of the internal transformations of an individual who loses some of her parts. Also, adopting the view that individuals are socially extended cognitive systems would lead to recognizing novel legal and ethical issues with respect to forced social isolation – endangerment of personal rights pertaining to personal integrity and identity