Преподаватель: Артемий Магун
Семестр: Весна 2024 (29 января – 21 мая)
Предметная область: HRA
Уровень курса: 500
Количество кредитов Бард колледжа: 4 кредита
Название курса: Философия войны и мира
Максимальный размер группы: 22
Расписание: Среда 14:30 – 17:30 Берлин (UTC + 2)
Кросслист: PHIL
Язык преподавания: английский

War – polemos – is often considered among the most anti-intellectual human activities, but until the last century, it used to be a long-time favorite subject of philosophy. Western philosophy begins with Heraclitus’ dictum that war is the father of all. The idea that the truth does not lie ready out there, but is essentially contested, was in a way a huge step forward, allowing philosophers to see a two-sided, dynamic nature of reality. At the same time, philosophy strived to tame war by turning it into «polemics,» a heated dialogue, or what Plato called «a dialectic.» Moreover, throughout the history of philosophy, war kept returning philosophy’s reality, or its uncanny “Other.” This made philosophy a great tool to understand the war itself, in all its apparent irrationality and wildness. This is particularly true of the 20th and 21st centuries, when, in spite of causing aversion, in its dissociation into the rational and irrational, regular and irregular forms, war became a privileged subject of thought. To achieve peace, philosophers thought they needed to grasp the war on a deeper level. Subsequently, this course’s focus will be the war of the most recent kind. To understand it, we will be reading such philosophers and political theorists as Heraclitus, Plato, Grotius, Kant, Hegel, Klausewitz, Tolstoy, Melville, Proust, Schmitt, Junger, Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, and Girard.