Philosophy Across Divides

by Isabel Inzunza Gomez

There are moments in history when thinking feels like an extreme sport: dangerous, inconvenient, and a little absurd. We happen to live in one of those moments.

The planet is heating up, democracies are fraying at the edges, and every day seems to audition for a future documentary called The Decline. For many of us, the experience is oddly personal: we’ve crossed borders to think, to study, to join the conversation, and discovered that intellectual life is mostly an exercise in staying curious while filling out paperwork.

Still, we keep going.

Philosophy Across Divides was created for exactly that kind of stubbornness. It’s a space for those who believe that thinking is not a luxury but a form of care; a way of keeping the lights on when the world starts flickering. Philosophy, when it’s alive, doesn’t sit quietly in a corner; it notices, interrupts, interferes.

Hannah Arendt once said that thinking is how we stay human in dark times. She meant that to pause and reflect, when everything demands speed and outrage, is itself an act of resistance. Hans Jonas took that further: he reminded us that the modern world doesn’t just need bright ideas, it needs responsible ones. To think well is to think ahead: about what our choices will do to the planet, to the people we’ll never meet, to the future we keep borrowing from.

And Edith Stein, philosopher and exile, called empathy a kind of participation, not the mushy kind, but the brave kind. To think empathetically means letting the world get under your skin without letting it paralyze you.

That’s harder than it sounds.

Academic life, especially across borders, can be lonely in strangely bureaucratic ways. We learn to translate ourselves: into new languages, new currencies, new citation styles. We send in our thoughts as PDF attachments and wait for judgment, half a world away from where we started. It’s not tragic, just slightly ridiculous. But behind every paper and every deadline extension, there’s a quiet insistence that meaning is still worth the effort.

We know, after all, that thinking has never been safe. From Boethius writing behind bars to Spinoza polishing lenses, from Gramsci’s Notebooks to Said’s exile, philosophers have always been the awkward ones at history’s dinner party. Too curious to fit in, too restless to leave.

And yet we keep showing up. Because somewhere between the panic and the paperwork, the act of thinking still feels like freedom.

Camus, who had a talent for understatement, said he found an invincible summer within himself. I like to think he meant the part of us that refuses to go numb, that stays curious, even when everything looks bleak or absurd. That small, stubborn light is what this section is about.

So this is an open invitation: to the migrant scholar balancing two time zones, to the student rewriting an essay at 3 a.m., to the philosopher who keeps refreshing the news and wondering if any of it still matters. It does.

Because philosophy isn’t there to comfort us: it’s there to keep us awake.

Send us your reflections, your doubts, your questions about what it means to think, hope, and stay human right now. Someone has to keep thinking while the world’s on fire. It might as well be us.