Political Philosophy and Dealing with the Coronavirus Dealing with the Epidemic of Covid-19 from the Perspective of Contemporary Political Philosophy

This paper examines the capacity of contemporary political philosophy theories in dealing with the Coronavirus disease (Covid-19). It proposes a special categorization which helps to classify the meaning and understand the diversity of action and practice in the public sphere based on theories of political philosophy. Based on this, four groups of meta-theories are identified: justice-oriented, tradition-oriented, result-oriented and freedom-oriented. In the next step, the paper identified the most important and better known theories within each of these meta-theories. In an attempt, based on a normative explanation of each of the theories of political philosophy, the theoretical capacity of political philosophy to understand the epidemic situation of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) and then to face it is studied. The research hypothesis is that to the extent that theories of political philosophy shift from justice-oriented holistic epistemology to Freedom-oriented non-holistic epistemology, their inclination toward controlling state management, such as social distancing, diminishes.