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Call for Papers (launched March 2026)

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​​Edited by Giannis Stamatellos and Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

 

Pluribus (stylized as PLUR1BUS) is an American post-apocalyptic science fiction television series created by Vince Gilligan. It premiered on in November 2025, and a second season has been ordered. 

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Humanity is infected by an extraterrestrial virus and has muted into a peaceful and happy “Hive Mind.” The Hive is the shared consciousness of the infected people. However, 12 people are immune and not affected by the virus and react in various ways to the new reality.

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Watch trailer       Wikipedia

Through the virus, all humanity becomes One: all infected people share one consciousness that even contains each other's memories. They have lost their individuality and cannot even say ‘I’. The virus functions as psychic glue binding all individuals together.

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The idea of “unity” and Oneness has fascinated philosophers at all times and in all traditions. For the Presocratics, the all-symbolizing One was most often identified with nature and set in contrast to the plurality of the Many. This tension continued to shape later Greek philosophical schools. Buddhist cosmology attempts to see the whole world (nature and culture) as One. Hinduism teaches the fundamental unity of all existence, proposing that diverse creation originates from a single, unchanging divine reality known as Brahman.

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Yet in Pluribus, becoming “One” renders people soulless, reducing them to machines optimized for utility. The motif of unity is especially unsettling in an era when communication technologies have generated unforeseen forms of collective constellation. Written in 2022, before AI became as pervasive as it is today, the series now appears uncannily prescient. Contemporary AI increasingly resembles a unifying consciousness—seemingly omniscient, always responsive, yet fundamentally devoid of interiority—precisely the condition dramatized in the narrative.

Today, people confide their deepest fears and beliefs to chatbots, while AI systems appear to “know” everything by virtue of the vast datasets on which large language models are trained. This produces a powerful and troubling analogy of “Oneness,” one in which the promise of total knowledge carries with it the latent danger of manipulation. In such a context, the question is no longer only what AI knows, but whether it can be trusted, and on what ethical grounds such trust can be justified.​​​

The book will be published by Brill-De Gruyter

 

Deadlines:

Abstracts are due on June 1st 2026.

First drafts of full-length chapter are due on January 1st 2027.

Final chapters will be due on September 1st 2027.

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Chapter length: 7000-10000 words

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Send abstracts (250 words) to: thorstenbotz()hotmail.com and gstamap()yahoo.com. Also send a short biographical note.

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If your abstract is accepted, the first drafts of chapters will be sent out to peer reviewers.

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Some suggested themes:​​

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  • The question of human freedom and autonomy shaping wills

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  • Pluribus as an allegory of generative AI and the hybrid agency between AI agents and humans, raising ethical questions of trust and trustworthiness within this shared space of action.

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  • The One-Many question (since the Presocratics). Multiplicity of unified outputs vs. underlying unity within plurality. The “interconnectedness” of all beings.

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  • “The Joining”:  Humans are mechanized and become networked beings: individuality vs “dividuality” (Deleuze)

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  • Cybernetics, genetics, bioethics: humans redesigning themselves

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  • Conformity as peace: is social harmony achieved at the cost of individuality?

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  • Pluribus ethics. It concerns Aristotle’s theory of happiness (eudaimonia), Mill’s Greatest Happiness Principle, and the “no harm” principle. If all share one consciousness, who is responsible for wrongdoing? The ethics of resistance. If memories are shared, what about personal privacy? What about the “virtues” in a world without choice?

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  • Is love without empathy possible?

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  • Was Aristotle right? The Eleatic conception of Being as an all-comprehensive unity or a self-contained eidos is incompatible with Aristotle’s idea of Being as an entity constituted by different individual beings. For Aristotle, being cannot be one and only and in itself. The universal element is created by our own intellect

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  • For Etienne La Boétie (1530-1563), in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, the “All-One” (“Tous Un”) was the All united in its pluralities and differences.

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  • All-unity (vseedinstvo) is a central concept in Russian religious philosophy, primarily developed by Vladimir Soloviev. It posits that all aspects of being—spiritual, physical, and divine—are intrinsically united in God, rather than merely connected. 

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  • Toxic positivity and its toned-down version “toxic wellness.”

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  • “We love him the same as we love you.” In monotheistic religions, and even in Buddhism, love and unity are often interlinked. Love leads to unity. Often love is the result of a depersonalizing experience that brings one closer to God. Does the power of love make sense?

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  • Plotinus' psychic homogeneity: “all souls are one”, a unified plurality that shares and distributes intelligence and emanates technological echoes of metaphysical unity

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  • Friendship vs. Companionship. Can AI be a companion?

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  • Surveillance and the digital Panopticon (Michel Foucault)

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  • Responsibility: who is accountable in human-AI co-decisions?

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  • “Everybody is in charge”: is this the ideal democracy?

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  • The idea of unity, as it appears in the form of tawhÄ«d in Islam,

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  • “The zoos are empty”: is the best world a “woke” world?

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  • Personal mortality vs. collective (digital) mortality

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  • Globalization as homogenization

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