The project aims to explore the philosophical tools required to deal with the great risks facing humanity. These concern, among others: pandemics, natural disasters, climate change, the unexpected and disastrous development of artificial intelligence, overpopulation, famine, and global injustice. There is a very influential picture that addresses such great risks departing from humanity's inability to conceive and respond to disasters. In the twentieth-century reflection on the atomic bomb, as well as on the Nazi horrors, this approach was taken by authors such as Hanna Arendt, Günther Anders and Hans Jonas. Humanity is portrayed as outdated compared to the technology it has produced (Anders) and is called upon to rediscover its constitutive, ontological ends (Jonas). This picture is found in the contemporary approach of existential risks (Bostrom) and in the wider literature of the critical social sciences where humanity is depicted on the brink of disaster. The project explores instead a number of philosophical approaches that focus on human rational and creative capacities to engage with great risks. The dimension of risk characterizes humanity as a form of life: it is not an external attack on it, as the mentioned conservative thinkers thought. Moreover, the dimension of risk brings into play reason and imagination as plastic capacities that respond to problems by redefining the context and envisaging new scenarios. Finally, the human mind is capable of cooperation and of inventing institutions capable to deliver answers on a collective level. The philosophical line here is one that values democracy as an epistemological, ethical and institutional context where problems can be faced and solutions proposed.
