Philosophy's Duty Towards Social Suffering. José A. Zamora & Reyes Mate  (eds.), Münster, Wien, Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2021 - ("Philosophie: Forschung und Wissenschaft"; 56) - ISBN: 978-3-643-91486-6, 208 págs.

Over the last five decades, social suffering has commanded increasing public attention in the wake of several historical processes that have changed the ways victims are perceived. The suffering exceeds individual experience. Its inseparableness from the social frameworks in which it is caused, distributed, and theorized make it a social and political reality. In making suffering eloquent by rendering it in conceptual form, in giving it epistemological weight by turning it into an object for thought, philosophy runs the risk of muting suffering, thereby neutralizing its ability to mobilize responses. In the experience of suffering philosophy finds a limit it must recognize as its own – the limit of its conceptual activity. Yet only by fulfilling its duty towards suffering – only by having the abolition of suffering as its ultimate goal – can philosophical thinking withstand a tacit complicity with injustice and uphold its commitment to the public good.