Barbarous Philosophers : Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg by Christopher Coker - used book

ISBN: 9780231701983

From Heraclitus in the sixth century B.C.E. to the twentieth-century philosopher-physicist Werner Heisenberg, intellectuals have long struggled to make sense of war and its presence in hu… More...

From Heraclitus in the sixth century B.C.E. to the twentieth-century philosopher-physicist Werner Heisenberg, intellectuals have long struggled to make sense of war and its presence in human society. Yet, as Christopher Coker contends, it is philosophers who created the concept of war, largely by defining its rules and establishing an oppositional dialectic of peace. The Greeks were the first to outline what Blaise Pascal called the "rules of war," and through their description of its "nature," influenced the thinking of contemporary generals and their military strategy. Nevertheless, this is not a book on the philosophical underpinnings of war but on the particular problems we face while fighting war today. Guided by the work of seventeen major thinkers, Coker examines several paradoxes of combat: the belief that war is a continuation, rather than a negation, of politics by other means; the idea that we should respect those who don't respect us; the notion that war can help a soldier reaffirm his humanity; and the odd fact that peace remains a contested concept. Coker draws on the work of sixteen philosophers who have tackled war directly and intensely in their writing. Each chapter begins with an epigram distilling the essence of a chosen philosopher's thinking on war and uses it as a prism through which to analyze the aspects of war most relevant to contemporary combat. "Barbarous Philosophers" entirely reorients our understanding of armed conflict and its persistence throughout human history. Media >, [PU: Columbia University Press]<