The article is a revised version of a report prepared and read at the international scientific conference “What is a community? Social hermeneutics, power and media” (Belgorod, 2019). Changes’ took place that significantly clarify the very idea of the congress, its substantive content and historical relevance during the preparation for the publication of the following report materials within a few months (!). Communication as a living sense-forming beginning of the congress has been tested by the idea of social distance as some completely stable form of self-organization of the philosophical community. The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the emergence of new conditions for its possibility: the personal turned out to be in some involuntary, “digital” identity with the public. It was impossible not to take these changes into account in the final edition of the text of the report, which included some additional semantic accents and historical in-formation. The presented material specifies the historical semantics of the idea of a philosophical congress, its substantive content and relevance. The article substantiates the understanding of the congress as a special, value-rich form of cognitive activism. The ethical and communicative meanings of the international philosophical congress are as a special or formative dialogic constellation of professional community, which does not require renouncing the individuality of each of the participants. It is thus important to suggest the moral prospects of the next VII Russian Philosophical Congress in probably an intensive connection with the renewal of value-epistemological attitudes and traditional technologies of philosophical education as an indispensable condition for the moral health of a philosophizing people.