After the World: An Introduction

How does the concept of the ‘world’ function in contemporary philosophical debates? We argue that today we are ‘after the world’ in at least two different senses of the expression: one of them evokes the seemingly irrevocable exhaustion of this idea; the other refers us to its persistent survival. On the one hand, with the advent of modernity the term seems to have slowly lost its unifying force as a philosophical concept and has increasingly been criticized by various thinkers as a totalizing concept. On the other hand, many thinkers are still pursuing viable definitions of this category that could help us face the various historical crises that plague our present all over the globe. The article opens with a general diagnosis of the way the rhetoric of ‘world-building’ is deployed in different cultural discourses today. After this opening, it provides an overview of the central themes of the essays in the issue by arguing that one of the pressing tasks of philosophy today is the critique of world-building. The article, then, concludes with a summary of the other contributions in the issue and the ways in which they each address the central topic of the issue.