who we are

This website is the public working environment and forum of the research project ‘The Possibility of Global Governance’ (see the page “about this project” for an introduction).

Gaston Meskens

I understand philosophical activism as caring for a special form of social justice. That is: social justice in the sense of ‘intellectual solidarity’ in the way we make sense of our interests and concerns in face of the complex issues that affect or threaten our well-being today. Intellectual solidarity is thereby a dual moral attitude: it denotes the preparedness to create processes and places for a meaningful intellectual confrontation, supported by the creation of processes and places of intellectual emancipation.

Many of the complex social, environmental and economic problems we face today are actually rooted in the systems we use to make sense of them. There are reasons to believe that our current formal methods of political decision making, scientific research and basic and advanced education are not designed to stimulate and enable reflexivity and intellectual solidarity in the interest of social justice. On the contrary: they rather facilitate the construction and maintenance of self-serving comfort zones around conflicting evidences. We don’t need theory to understand that this kind of politics, research and education will not help us to tackle these complex social, environmental and economic problems for the better of society. From this perspective, I see intellectual solidarity as an advanced form of social justice, as it cares for the ethics and aesthetics of dealing with the uncertain, the complex and the unknown in our social and political life.

Motivated by this view, I have set up the research project ‘The Possibility of Global Governance’. It is a personal and unfunded initiative, and it is done in cooperation with the Centre for Ethics and Value Inquiry of the University of Ghent, Belgium.

For more, you may want to check this profile.

The Centre for Ethics & Value Inquiry, University of Ghent

The Center for Ethics & Value Inquiry (CEVI) carries out research and teaching on the ethics of globalisation and on ethics under the conditions of globalisation. CEVI is based at Ghent University in Belgium where it is part of the Facutly of Arts and Philosophy. The Centre is a founding member of the International Global Ethics Association (IGEA).

Contact

Gaston Meskens [> gaston.meskens@theacademia.org]
CEVI – Centre for Ethics and Value Inquiry [> http://www.cevi-globalethics.ugent.be/]