Silvia Benso is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author and editor of many books, including coeditor (with Elvira Roncalli) of Contemporary Italian Women Philosophers: Stretching the Art of Thinking, also published by SUNY Press.

• AcknowledgmentsEpidemics, Precariousness, and Vulnerability: Introductory Remarks toward a Rethinking of LifeSilvia BensoPart I: Confronting Disaster 1. Cassandra's Details: Coronavirus and the Course of GlobalizationLuisa Bonesio2. Improvising Self-Expression in the Time of a Contingency that Has Eliminated ContingencyAlessandro Bertinetto3. Out of the Choir: Bodies Inclined on the PlayboyLorenzo Bernini4. Metaphor as Illness? Life, War, and a Linguistic PharmakonAlberto MartinengoPart II: Vulnerability, Care, and Responsibility 5. "The Lungs that We All Are": Rethinking Life in the Times of a PandemicOlivia Guaraldo6. Necropolitics, Care, and the CommonElia Zaru7. Lacking BeingsLuca Illetterati8. Vulnerable ExistencesCaterina Resta9. Life and Useless Suffering: Responsibility for Others and the Impossible TheodicyRita FulcoPart III: Rethinking Life 10. Greek Zèn: Living Starting from the OriginAlessandra Cislaghi11. Life and the "Black Swan"Enrica Lisciani-Petrini12. What Finitude Does Not Say: Rethinking Life beyond NihilismRoberto Mancini13. Writing Life: Biography, Autobiography, and the RemainderClaudia Baracchi14. With the Finitude of Life beyond the Phenomenon: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and a Metaphysics of the FiniteUgo PeroneContributorsIndex

"This volume represents the best that philosophy has to offer the contemporary world: deeply probing, reflective responses to a world in crisis. The reader will find in these essays precisely the kind of original thought and sensitivity to present and future uncertainty demanded by a global pandemic. Most impressively, they will find a refusal to flee the vulnerability that is our human condition." — Diane Enns, Ryerson University"An extraordinary, timely, provocative, and engrossing volume. Benso collects an exceptional range of Italian voices, all of whom are rooted in their own cultural points of reference yet widely conversant with global thought in a Continental idiom, as they confront philosophically an experience with which we are all grappling." — Jason M. Wirth, Seattle University