War is often associated with irrationality: terms like “the fog of war” and “the heat of battle” gesture at the overcoming of reasoned deliberation by rash, emotionally-charged, and libidinal forces. Yet, the organized practice of killing and domination between human groupings has long been an object or element of philosophical reflection. From the outset of the Western philosophical tradition, war, pólemos, has been understood not just as a seemingly ineradicable dimension of human affairs, but key to the metaphysical conviction that violence is generative of both being and norms. Why has war, a form of systemic destruction, been granted such a place of privilege? What assumptions about human nature and cosmology has the philosophy of war depended on—and generated? And how have philosophers over time confronted the theory and the practice—the ideals and the brutal reality—of warfare?
From Heraclitus to Hegel, Weil to Heidegger, and Deleuze & Guattari to Virilio, this course will explore a number of episodes in the long history of philosophy’s analytical, ontological and ethical engagement with war. Among the themes and problems we will consider are: the complex legacy of the ancient Greek distinction between pólemos and stásis (civil war); the criteria used to designate war as just; philosophy’s appropriation of strategic thinking from Machiavelli to Clausewitz; the place of warfare in contemporary French thought; and philosophical treatments of the lived experience of war. Students will also engage the complex legacy of philosophers who bore arms, including Socrates in the Peloponnesian War, Descartes in the Thirty Years’ War, Ludwig Wittgenstein in World War I, and Simone Weil in the Spanish Civil War.
