Nature Reflection

From Heraclitus in the sixth century B.C.E. to the twentieth-century philosopher-physicist Werner Heisenberg, intellectuals have struggled to make sense of war and its presence in human society. Yet Christopher Coker contends that philosophers are the ones 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 military strategy.

Nevertheless, Coker’s book focuses less on the philosophical underpinnings of war and more on the particular problems we face while fighting war today. Guided by the work of sixteen major thinkers, it 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 the concept of peace is still contested. Coker draws on the work of 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 aspects of war most relevant to contemporary combat. Barbarous Philosophers entirely reorients our understanding of armed conflict throughout human history.

Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War From Heraclitus to Heisenberg (Columbia/Hurst)

This book discusses deep problems about our place in the world with a minimum of technical jargon. It argues that ‘absolutist’ ideas dating back to Plato continue to mislead generations of theoretical physicists and theologians. It explains that the multi-layered nature of our present descriptions of the world is unavoidable, not because of anything about the world but because of our own human natures. It tries to rescue mathematics from the singular and exceptional status that it has been assigned, as much by those who understand it as by those who do not. It provides direct quotations from many of the important contributors to its subject, and concludes with a penetrating criticism of many of the recent contributions to the often acrimonious debates about science and religions.

Why Beliefs Matter: Reflections on the Nature of Science