Karma and its consequences are a major theme in Buddhism. When discussing war and peace in a Buddhist context, it is important to distinguish Buddhist philosophy from the practice of Buddhists in historical and present fact. This is because Buddhist philosophy on the subject, especially in the teachings of the Buddha and the mainstream Mahāyāna teachings, so heavily emphasizes non‐violence. The advent of engaged Buddhism places the dilemma of Buddhist violence in a new context. In so far as it does (...) not compromise the non‐violent and non‐particularist ideals of Buddhism, engaged Buddhism is an ongoing experiment in reconciling Buddhism's ideals with the reality of Buddhist behavior, in translating Buddhist personal ethics into a social ethic, and in determining how far Buddhist non‐violence can be taken on the societal level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 127-150 [Access article in PDF] They Who Burned Themselves for Peace: Quaker and Buddhist Self-Immolators during the Vietnam War Sallie B. KingJames Madison UniversityNhat Chi Mai was a lay disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh and member of the Order of Interbeing, an Engaged Buddhist order founded by Nhat Hanh. On May 16, 1967, Vesak, the celebration of the birth of the Buddha, she burned herself (...) to death outside the Tu Nghiem Temple, a nunnery. An idealistic young student with much to live for, she sacrificed herself in an effort to bring the war to an end. In a letter to the U.S. government she wrote, I offer my body as a torch to dissipate the dark to waken love among men to give peace to Vietnam the one who burns herself for peace. 1In her farewell letter to Thich Nhat Hanh she wrote, "Thay, don't worry too much. We will have peace soon." 2On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a devout Quaker and ardent pacifist, drove from Baltimore to Washington and burned himself to death at the Pentagon, at a spot estimated to be 40 to 100 feet from the window of Robert S. McNamara, then Secretary of Defense and one of the chief American prosecutors of the war. Shortly before his death, he wrote to his wife, "For weeks even months I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning I was shown.... Know that I love thee but must act...." 3 Morrison took his baby daughter, Emily, along with him and held her in his arms as he prepared for his act. Somehow--accounts differ as to how it happened--she was separated from her father before the flames engulfed him and she emerged entirely unharmed, though her clothing smelled strongly of the kerosene with which Morrison had soaked himself. 4There were others who burned themselves to death during the war in Vietnam. The venerable Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc was the first. On June 11, 1963, [End Page 127] at a downtown crossroads in Saigon, he sat in the lotus posture and, in a state of meditative control, burned himself to death in protest of the Diem regime's repression of the Buddhist religion. Many Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns followed his example; I do not know all their names, or exactly how many they were.In America, to my knowledge, eight people burned themselves to death during the war. Two were Quakers: Norman Morrison and Alice Herz. Roger LaPorte, a former Trappist seminarian who had become a Catholic worker, burned himself to death one week after Norman Morrison. The others were: Hiroko Hayasaki, a Japanese-American Buddhist; Erik Thoen, a student of Zen Buddhism; another university student, George Winne; a high school student, Ronald Brazee; and Florence Beaumont, described as a "housewife." A number of others attempted self-immolation but survived. 5In this paper I will focus upon the self-immolations of Norman Morrison and Nhat Chi Mai. I will also have a few comments on Thich Quang Duc. My remarks are intended, however, to have relevance to all the Buddhist and Quaker self-immolators. 6Let us now consider in more detail some of the features of the self-immolations of Norman Morrison and Nhat Chi Mai, and some of the issues they pose to the Quaker and Buddhist communities, respectively. Precipitating Events While neither act was the result of a moment's impulse, we still would do well to ask what events most proximately precipitated the two self-immolations. In Norman Morrison's case, the precipitating events were two. The morning of the day he immolated himself he read a report of the American bombing of a village in Vietnam. Paris Match had published an interview with a French priest, recuperating in a Saigon clinic, who had witnessed and survived the bombing raid. The priest said, "I have seen my faithful burned up in napalm.... I have seen... (shrink)

"Margaret L. King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant—but by no means the most obvious—texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and (...) striking insights into the intellectual transformation which has done more than any other to shape the world in which we live today. It is _simply the best introduction to the subject now available_."_ —Anthony Pagden, UCLA, and author of _The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters_ Contents:_ Chronology, Introduction _Chapter One - Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697_ _Idols, or false notions: _Francis Bacon, _The New Instrument_ _I think, therefore I am: _René Descartes, Discourse on Method _God, or Nature: _Baruch Spinoza, _Ethics_ _The system of the world: _Isaac Newton, _Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy_ _He searched for truth throughout his life: _Pierre Bayle, _Historical and Critical Dictionary_ _Chapter Two - _The Learned Maid: 1638–1740 _A face raised toward heaven:_ Anna Maria van Schurman, _Whether the Study of Letters Befits a Christian Woman_ _The worlds I have made:_ Margaret Cavendish, _The Blazing World_ _A finer sort of cattle:_ Bathsua Makin, _An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen_ _I warn you of the world:_ Madame de Maintenon, _Letter: On the Education of the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr_, and _Instruction: On the World_ _The daybreak of your reason:_ Émilie Du Châtelet, _Fundamentals of Physics_ _Chapter Three - _A State of Perfect Freedom: 1689–1695 _The chief criterion of the True Church:_ John Locke, _Letter on Toleration_ _Freedom from any superior power on earth:_ John Locke, _Second Treatise on Civil Government_ _A white paper, with nothing written on it:_ John Locke, _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ _Let your rules be as few as possible:_ John Locke, _Some Thoughts Concerning Education_ _From death, Jesus Christ restores all to life:_ John Locke, _The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures_ _Chapter Four - All Things Made New: 1725–1784_ _In the wilderness, they are reborn:_ Giambattista Vico, _The New Science_ _Without these Names, nothing can be known,_ Carl Linnaeus, _System of Nature_ _All the clouds at last are lifted:_ Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, _The Successive Advancement of the Human Mind_ _A genealogical or encyclopedic tree of knowledge:_ Jean le Rond d’Alembert, _Preliminary Discourse_ _Dare to know! :_ Immanuel Kant, _What Is Enlightenment?_ _Chapter Five - Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779_ _The narrow limits of human understanding:_ David Hume, _Anof a Book Lately Published_ _The soul is but an empty word:_ Julien Offray de La Mettrie, _Man a Machine_ _All is reduced to sensation:_ Claude Adrien Helvétius, _On the Mind_ _An endless web of fantasies and falsehoods:_ Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, _Common Sense_ _Let each believe that his own ring is real:_ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, _Nathan the Wise_ _Chapter Six - Crush That Infamous Thing: 1733–1764_ _This is the country of sects:_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Letters_ _Disfigured by myth, until enlightenment comes:_ Voltaire, _The Culture and Spirit of Nations_ _The best of all possible worlds:_ Voltaire, _Candide_ _Are we not all children of the same God?:_ Voltaire, _Treatise on Tolerance_ _If a book displeases you, refute it! :_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Dictionary_ _Chapter Seven - Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776_ _Things must be so ordered that power checks power,_ Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, _The Spirit of the Laws_ _Complete freedom of trade must be ensured:_ François Quesnay, _General Maxims for the Economic Management of an Agricultural Kingdom_ _The nation's war against the citizen: Cesare_ Beccaria, _On Crimes and Punishments_ _There is no peace in the absence of justice:_ Adam Ferguson, _An Essay on the History of Civil Society_ _Led by an invisible hand:_ Adam Smith, _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ _Chapter Eight - Encountering Others: 1688–1785_ _Thus died this great man:_ Aphra Behn, _Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave_ _Not one sins the less for not being Christian: _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, _Embassy Letters_ _Do you not restore to them their liberty?:_ Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, _Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies_ _Some things which are rather interesting:_ Captain James Cook, _Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World_ _The inner genius of my being:_ Johann Gottfried von Herder, _Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind_ _Chapter - Nine Citizen of Geneva: 1755–1782_ _The most cunning project ever to enter the human mind: _Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality_ _The supreme direction of the General Will:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract _Two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps,_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Julie, or the New Heloise_ _Build a fence around your child’s soul:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Emile, or On Education_ _This man will be myself:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Confessions_ _Chapter Ten - Vindications of Women: 1685–1792_ _No higher design than to get her a husband:_ Mary Astell, _Reflections on Marriage_ _The days of my bondage begin:_ Anna Stanisławska, _Orphan Girl_ _A dying victim dragged to the altar:_ Denis Diderot, _The Nun_ _Created to be the toy of man:_ Mary Wollstonecraft, _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ _Man, are you capable of being just?:_ Olympe de Gouges, _Declaration of the Rights of Woman as Citizen_ _Chapter Eleven - American Reverberations: 1771–1792_ _I took upon me to assert my freedom:_ Benjamin Franklin, _Autobiography_ _Freedom has been hunted round the globe:_ Thomas Paine, _Common Sense_ _Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights:_ Thomas Jefferson and Others, _Declaration of Independence_ _A safeguard against faction and insurrection:_ James Madison, _Federalist No. 10_ _An end to government by force and fraud:_ Thomas Paine, _The Rights of Man_ _Chapter Twelve - Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794_ _A partnership of the living, the dead, and those unborn:_ Edmund Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ _The future destiny of the human species:_ Nicolas de Condorcet, _A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Mind_ Texts and Studies, Index. 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James VI and I united the crowns of England and Scotland. His books are fundamental sources of the principles which underlay the union. In particular, his Basilikon Doron was a best-seller in England and circulated widely on the Continent. Among the most important and influential British writings of their period, the king's works shed light on the political climate of Shakespeare's England and the intellectual background to the civil wars which afflicted Britain in the mid-seventeenth century. James' political philosophy (...) was a moderated absolutism, with an emphasis on the monarch's duty to rule according to law and the public good. Locke quoted his speech to parliament of 1610 approvingly, and Hobbes likewise praised 'our most wise king'. This edition is the first to draw on all the early texts of James' books, with an introduction setting them in their historical context. (shrink)

This essay supplies an historical review of black thought (from the Civil War forward) in the American South. Its emphasis is upon the biography of figures born in the region, whether resident or exile, concentrating on three foundational actors: Booker Washington, Frederick Douglass and Ida Wells. Significant strands of later thought are seen as largely derived from the latter two. The thematic anchor of this review is ‘resistance and nonviolence’, involving (1) a primary focus on equal rights, (2) a derivative (...) focus on emancipation and desegregation, (3) exploration of nonviolence as a mode of resistance to oppression, (4) exploration of liberative violence, and (5) a larger concern with the appropriate type and degree of integration/separation implicit in or consistent with an equal rights regime. Douglass and Wells are cast as attending to sub‐themes (1) and (2).This essay is designed to fit within the larger framework of the collection, in which the religious leaders Howard Thurman and Martin King are allocated to sub‐theme (3), the novelist Richard Wright to (4), and the lawyers Thurgood Marshall, Barbara Jordan and Fred Gray to (5). The future challenge to black thought is assumed to lie in deeper reflection on (5), with a view to locating an ever more perfect balance between ‘nation’ (the ethnic community of Afro‐America) and ‘state’ (the US federal government). (shrink)

Thomas L. Friedman's recent book on globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, sees a religious value in globalization: “globalization emerges from below … from people's very souls and from their deepest aspirations” (1999, 338). Pierre Teilhard de Chardin made similar claims in 1920, calling globalization the “deep‐rooted religious movement of our age” (Teilhard 1979, 211). He came to this awareness through his experience in World War I. There he began connecting globalization to its roots in evolution and to the (...) mystics’ desire for the “All,” a desire he saw animating the work of believing and unbelieving scientists. He found confirmation of his ideas in the letters of Saint Paul, who told of God eventually filling all things. Teilhard used the vocabulary of mysticism to describe global developments in technology, industry, politics, and the environment, and the ardor of his texts has led to their being widely used for secular gatherings on global subjects. (shrink)

Zoos are typically public attractions that do not explicitly, or through a more implicit culture, expect quietness from their guests. This paper will explore whether quietness is something we should aim for when we are visiting zoos. Primarily through analogy with other public spaces which share some of the key characteristics of zoos (libraries and schools, cinemas, theatres and galleries, war memorials, and hospitals and gardens), we suggest that quiet is indeed appropriate in zoos (more appropriate than being noisy). A (...) major component of this argument will be the exploration of what is meant by quiet (and noise), and outlining a concept of quietness based on an idea of attention. The central premise here, drawing upon theories of attention and love, is that noise involves a certain kind of outward expression, which leaves less room for the appreciation of, and attention to, the animals and information that the zoo provides. The article will reflect on how a call for quiet may create scope for enhancing the educational possibilities of zoos, and how zoos might profit by taking the acoustic dimension of visitor behaviour into account when considering their values. (shrink)

After hearing Donald Trump's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention held in Cleveland, Ohio, Newt Gingrich was interviewed live on CNN about the menacing tone of the address. Gingrich not only defended Trump's nearly apocalyptic vision of America if he was not elected, the former Speaker of the House swiped aside the clear data that indicated that the criminalized landscapes portrayed in Trump's speech might just be the work of a frenzied and fearful imagination rather than based in fact. (...) "'People feel more threatened,'" Gingrich insisted. "'As a political candidate, I'll go with what people feel '". Commenting in Forbes shortly thereafter, Ethan Siegel, a scientist and science... (shrink)

In "The Law of Peoples", John Rawls proposes a set of principles for international relations, his "Law of Peoples." He calls this Law a "realistic utopia," and invites consideration of this Law from the perspectives of non-Western cultures. This paper considers Rawls's Law from the perspective of Engaged Buddhism, the contemporary form of socially and politically activist Buddhism. We find that Engaged Buddhists would be largely in sympathy with Rawls's proposals. There are differences, however: Rawls builds his view from the (...) idea of independent nation--states, while the Buddhists see the world more in terms of a single humankind, the members being highly interdependent with one another, and also with the physical world. The Buddhists would also push harder than Rawls for global structures building multilateralism, restrict more severely justifications for war and behavior in war, stress economic justice more heavily, and insist on all the human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (shrink)

By 1918 Bertrand Russell had well-formed and distinctive opinions on many aspects of economic philosophy, theory and policy. In the second half of his life (1919–70) he wrote at great length on a very wide range of economic issues, including modern technology and the prospects for abolishing scarcity; population growth, eugenics and birth control; the economic development of China; the case for democratic socialism; the case against Soviet communism; the causes of economic crises; and the economic background to war and (...) peace. Russell’s economic writings appeared as chapters of books on subjects as diverse as the philosophy of science, the history of nineteenth-century Europe, the principles of education and the case for world government. Economic themes can be detected even in his most frivolous newspaper articles. He was a great literary stylist, and his popular writings on economics were widely read and possibly quite influential, especially between the wars. (shrink)

11 April 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the papal encyclical, Pacem in Terris, a document that has exerted enormous influence on the doctrines of war and peace articulated by Roman Catholic and non-Catholic writers alike. The argument we make here is that in its understanding of human rights, international peace and philosophical anthropology, the encyclical in effect abandons the ?just war? teachings that had guided the church's view of human conflict for 16 centuries, and we argue that the departure (...) is a mistake. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the permissibility of forming defensive alliances, which is a neglected topic in the contemporary literature on the ethics of war and peace. Drawing on the jus ad bellum criterion of proportionality in just war theory, I argue that if permissible defensive force requires that its expected harms must be counterbalanced by its expected goods, then, permissible defensive alliance formation seems to also require that its expected harms must be counterbalanced by its expected goods, as the (...) latter can result in much the same consequences as the former. Moreover, due to the incommensurability of values in play when making proportionality judgments, I argue for a value pluralist understanding of the criterion. On this view, defensive alliance formation is proportionate if the expected gains in certain values (goods) intuitively justify the expected losses in others (harms) when compared to the alternative expected value trade-offs of not allying. To explore the implications of my theoretical claims I consider them in relation to John Mearsheimer’s influential account of the causes of the Russo-Ukrainian War. On this account, the West’s strategy to assimilate Ukraine and Ukraine’s pursuit of NATO membership post-annexation of Crimea were disproportionate because the expected harms were unjustified when compared to the alternative expected goods and harms of forgoing Ukrainian membership of NATO. This does not imply that Russia’s aggression is just, but it does imply that the West and Ukraine are partially responsible for the war and that they acted impermissibly in attempting to expand/join NATO. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell was perhaps the last great philosopher to take an active interest in economics. After a brief, youthful engagement with the economics of socialism in 1889, Russell wrote on economic questions in three separate periods up to 1918, and in each case there was a clear political motivation. The first, in 1895–96, arose from his investigation of Marxism as a creed and of German social democracy as its principal contemporary political expression. The second, in 1903–04, was provoked by his (...) intervention on the free trade side of the tariff controversy. Finally, in 1915–18, Russell's commitment to Guild Socialism and to war resistance led him to some profound, if rather speculative, reflections on the economics of libertarian socialism. In this paper I discuss each of these three phases in Russell's economic thought and conclude that he never went far enough in his opposition to neo-classical theory in general, or to its utilitarian foundations in particular. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell was perhaps the last great philosopher to take an active interest in economics. After a brief, youthful engagement with the economics of socialism in 1889, Russell wrote on economic questions in three separate periods up to 1918, and in each case there was a clear political motivation. The first, in 1895–96, arose from his investigation of Marxism as a creed and of German social democracy as its principal contemporary political expression. The second, in 1903–04, was provoked by his (...) intervention on the free trade side of the tariff controversy. Finally, in 1915–18, Russell's commitment to Guild Socialism and to war resistance led him to some profound, if rather speculative, reflections on the economics of libertarian socialism. In this paper I discuss each of these three phases in Russell's economic thought and conclude that he never went far enough in his opposition to neo-classical theory in general, or to its utilitarian foundations in particular. (shrink)

Thomas L. Friedman's recent book on globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, sees a religious value in globalization: “globalization emerges from below … from people's very souls and from their deepest aspirations” (1999, 338). Pierre Teilhard de Chardin made similar claims in 1920, calling globalization the “deep‐rooted religious movement of our age” (Teilhard 1979, 211). He came to this awareness through his experience in World War I. There he began connecting globalization to its roots in evolution and to the (...) mystics’ desire for the “All,” a desire he saw animating the work of believing and unbelieving scientists. He found confirmation of his ideas in the letters of Saint Paul, who told of God eventually filling all things. Teilhard used the vocabulary of mysticism to describe global developments in technology, industry, politics, and the environment, and the ardor of his texts has led to their being widely used for secular gatherings on global subjects. (shrink)

Dilman conjures up a memorable vision of two great twentieth-century dragons at war. Each takes a turn at stimulating the other with its blue breath of naturalist hellfire. Each responds like a venomously programmed beast with a cold douche of quotations. Quine is provoked to repeat famous statements—mainly from “On What There Is,” “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” “Epistemology Naturalised,” and The Web of Belief. Wittgenstein is induced to hurl back commentaries from a great many works, up from the Tractatus. Wittgenstein, (...) of course, is said to triumph. (shrink)

My title links together kings, war, and the economy, and the linkage is deliberate. I do not of course wish to suggest that Hellenistic kings did nothing but fight wars, that they were responsible for all the wars in the period, that royal wars were nothing but a form of economic activity, or that the economy of the kings was dependent purely on the fruits of military success, though there would be an element of truth in all these propositions. But (...) I wish to react against the frequent tendency to separate topics that are related, the tendency to treat notions relating to what kings were or should be as something distinct from what they actually did, and the tendency to treat political and military history on the one hand as something separate from economic and social history on the other.A number of provisos should be made at the outset. The title promises more than the paper can deliver; in particular, more will be said about kings and war than about kings and the economy. The subject is handled at a probably excessive level of generalization and abstraction. I talk about Hellenistic kings in general, but in practice it would obviously be necessary to draw distinctions between different dynasties, different times and places, and individual rulers, and some of those distinctions I shall indicate. Conclusions are provisional and subject to modification and considerable expansion in detail. Finally, two points of terminology. I use the word ‘Hellenistic’ for no better reason than out of the force of acquired habit, but of course the word and the concept are modern inventions that were unknown to the ancient world. (shrink)

The event that King Kuai of Yan demised the crown to his premier Zizhi, is a tentative way of political power transmission happened in the social transforming Warring States Period, which was influenced by the popular theory of Yao and Shun’s demise of that time. However, this tentative was obviously a failure, coming under attacks from all Confucian, Taoist and Legalist scholars. We may understand the development of the thinking concerning the issue of political legitimacy during the Warring States (...) Period by analyzing the different commentaries by different schools on this unusual event, and get some beneficial inspirations. (shrink)

Abstract This essay examines the conditions under which the great medieval Jewish rabbinic figure Moses Maimonides (1138?1204) took war to be justified. In particular, it argues that Maimonides did not hold that universal belief in one deity, on the model of a (Christian or Almohad) holy war or religious crusade, is a sufficient condition to justify the pursuit of a war. At most a war is justified if it enables the creation of a monotheistic environment for the Jewish people within (...) their own boundaries or national territory. Among other topics, the essay also analyzes Maimonides' distinction between ?commanded? wars and ?optional wars?, his concept of idolatry, and his account of jus in bellum. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social ThoughtCharles W. ChristianBonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought Edited by Willis Jenkins and Jennifer M. McBride Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. 304 pp. $25.00Countless books have been written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr., assessing their individual leadership in the areas of social justice and theology in the twentieth (...) century. Relatively few works have brought these two individuals together in comparative analysis. This book, edited by Willis [End Page 216] Jenkins (assistant professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School) and Jennifer M. McBride (visiting lecturer at Candler Divinity School), seeks to do that; it brings together a wide array of scholars in the fields of ethics, theology, pastoral ministry, political theory, African American studies, and feminist theology.As McBride points out in her introduction, the “significant differences in their historic, sociopolitical contexts” can present challenges in comparing the work of these two men and in seeking to contemporize them (8). However, the thought and life of both martyrs “demand[s] action”; in other words, the “thought” of both Bonhoeffer and King remains incomplete without “courageous, constructive, redemptive social engagement” (3). It is in this spirit that the book unfolds.The book is divided into four parts. The first four chapters compose part 1 (titled “Critical Distance”), which takes a broader look at the legacies, key concepts, and limitations or critiques of the thought of Bonhoeffer and King. For example, the second chapter by Stephen R. Haynes (“King and Bonhoeffer as Protestant Saints”) reminds us of the perils of the larger-than-life legacies of both these individuals. When noteworthy persons become personalities or cultural heroes, key aspects of their legacies can be minimized or overlooked. This is particularly important in contemporary American settings where politicians and commentators tend to reduce the legacies of both Bonhoeffer and King to fit their own political agendas.Part 2 pays specific attention to the influence of Bonhoeffer and King on matters related to social justice, such as poverty, racism, and violence. Among the notable contributions in this section is the chapter by Craig J. Slane that deals with the “unexpected turn toward violence” (112) for Bonhoeffer during his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler during World War II. Part 3 looks at the ways in which the lives and teaching (and especially preaching, in King’s life in particular) of Bonhoeffer and King are instruments of social redemption. In addition to noting the influence of Niebuhr’s emphasis on social sin and social redemption on King’s preaching and leadership, it points out that both Bonhoeffer and King were deeply influenced by the economic and social upheavals of their time; their preaching, teaching, and writing sought to address, in concrete ways, the racial, economic, and political realities of their contexts. In part 4, “Peacemaking,” four authors highlight the contributions King and Bonhoeffer have made to peacemaking and the influence these contributions continue to have. They discuss both men’s commitment to nonviolence and pacifism and the particular challenges this commitment created for them (especially for Bonhoeffer, given his participation in a plot to overthrow Hitler).The essays in this book do not present these two martyrs as unblemished. The book contains rich discussions that honestly assess their personal struggles [End Page 217] of conscience as well as their contextual struggles with such issues as the role of women. Furthermore, the reader will find a solid introduction to the lives and thought of both men while at the same time sitting in on a diverse conversation about how their influential interpretations of the Christian faith can continue to be fleshed out. May this kind of conversation (and action) continue!Charles W. ChristianMount Vernon Nazarene UniversityCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Nothing about Xenophon's Hellenica is more outrageous than his treatment of the relations of Persia and the Greeks. It was orthodoxy in the circle of Agesilaus that Theban medizing, barbarismos, had sabotaged the plans for a glorious anabasis and recalled him to the defence of his city . Not until the Thebans woo and win the fickle favour of the King , does anything like detail emerge. In the regrettable interlude, the less said the better. If the third speech (...) of Andocides had not survived, there would have been some tangled theorizing about a note in Didymus , especially as regards ‘the ambassadors who in Sparta consented’, but sober historical judgement would never have transgressed so far from the text of Xenophon as to postulate a Peace Congress in Sparta as well as in Sardis in 392. Likewise, the merest chance of epigraphic survival assures us that the oaths, which the ‘Athenians and the Spartans and the other Greeks’ swore in 387/6, ‘the King swore’ — and so on. If we did not have the reflection of Ephorus in Diodorus, albeit a mirror cracked and blemished, we would be sadly astray in 375 and 371. When, however, the despicable Thebans become the King's favoured power, disgraceful scenes unfold. ‘Pelopidas very much had things his own way with the Persian; he could say that the Thebans alone of the Greeks had fought on the King's side at Plataea, that they had never afterwards campaigned against him, that the Spartans were at war with them because they would not join Agesilaus…etc.’ . A Persian is found at Thebes reading out the contents of a Royal Rescript, after displaying the Royal seal ; at Sparta twenty years before, such details had been left to the imagination. The cause of Xenophon's method in this matter is not for the moment under discussion, but rather the consequence, viz. our uncertainty about what precisely the King's Peace said. There was a document, inscribed on stone pillars and displayed in the national shrines . If ever a copy turns up, what can we expect to find? The measure of our uncertainty was provided by Wilcken, who produced a curious hypothesis which found little sympathy; that he could do so shows the state of the evidence. Some effort of the imagination is needed, and those who gravely disapprove of conjectures of what might have been the case need read no further. At the end one can be sure of very little. Conjectures, however, have been uttered, en passant, elsewhere. What may prove to be a chorus of disdain has begun. A formal confession may be welcome. (shrink)

On June 13, 323 BCE, Alexander the Great, king of the Greeks, died at Babylon at the age of thirty-three. He had conquered a large part of the known world—the oikoumenē of the Greeks—and he had pushed back the eastern limits of the universe by advancing into India as far as the basin of the Ganges. He had also done everything in his power to give birth to a myth around his person, a myth that endures to this day. (...) Alexander came to power in 336 BCE, at the age of twenty, after his father, Philip II, king of Macedon, had been assassinated. He was the cherished pupil of Aristotle, who followed him in his ventures and dedicated a treatise to him entitled Rhetoric to Alexander. He went to war in Asia against the .. (shrink)

Just prior to his last fight, Beowulf delivers a long speech on the headlands above the dragon's cave . It is, with the exception of his report to Hygelac on returning from Heorot, Beowulf's longest and perhaps his most puzzling speech. Little has been written about the speech as a whole; in fact, rather little attention has been paid to any of Beowulf's speeches, which is perhaps not surprising given Beowulf's stated preference for deeds over words. “It is better for (...) a man to avenge his friend than to mourn much,” Beowulf tells Hrothgar, and indeed in a heroic narrative we might ordinarily expect actions to take precedence over words. So it dismays those who would judge the poem primarily as a heroic narrative to find, as Klaeber did, that despite the hero's initial appearance as “an aggressive war hero of the Achilles or Sigfrit type,” Beowulf is in fact “somewhat tame, sentimental, and fond of talking,” and nowhere more so than in this speech. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 45, Issue 2, pp 267 - 287 Heraclitus reportedly said that πόλεμος is “father of all, king of all”. However, we should be cautious around the translation of πόλεμος as “war.” How to hear this term in its multifarious signification is precisely the theme of the present essay. The analysis of various Heraclitean fragments, furthermore, may call into question the view of politics as constitutively involving war and violence and contribute to the task of understanding politics (...) otherwise. Granted, the examination of Heraclitean texts may appear rather tangential, even remote, with respect to this question. And yet, however obliquely, this study points to a meditation on politics as genuinely and meaningfully resting on the practice of peace—or, one might say, on a radically other understanding of the word “war.”. (shrink)

We are ruled by judges whom we know, we enjoy the benefits | Of peace and war, as if the warrior Quirinus, | As if peaceful Numa were governing.With these words the poet Claudian lauds the Emperor Honorius on the occasion of his fourth consulship in 398 by comparing him to Rome's deified founder, Romulus-Quirinus, and to Numa Pompilius, its second king, who was proverbial for wisdom and piety. Claudian's panegyric stands in a long literary tradition in which the (...) legendary Roman kings were depicted as models of statesmanship. This exemplary tradition left its mark on a broad array of late antique works, including historical compendia such as the pseudo-AurelianDe uiris illustribus, which narrates the kings’ deeds as soldiers and statesmen, and the writings of antiquarians such as Macrobius and Servius, who collected information on the kings’ invention of cults and calendars. Servius’ interest in the kings implies that they featured in the teaching provided by other late antiquegrammaticias well, and thus that most literate Latin-speakers would have had some knowledge of their deeds. Advanced education in rhetoric likewise drew on Virgil and other school texts for historicalexemplaincluding Romulus and Numa, who appear in panegyrics and in brief histories, such as Eutropius’Breviary, that probably served as reference texts for the political elite. The kings thus loomed large in Roman perceptions of the founding of their empire, which began with the heroic Romulus, was strengthened by Numa's establishment of the Roman cultic system, and was secured by the later kings’ political and military successes. (shrink)

It has been a widespread belief among historians of antiquity that Athens’ importance on the political scene declined rapidly after 338, and especially after 322; Athens, so it is assumed, succumbed to the will of Alexander and, later on, of his Diadochoi. Of course, it cannot be denied that Athens found itself in a very precarious and sometimes impossible position. Yet the attitudes of Athens towards one king or the other, as well as its status, vary considerably until 261, (...) the end of the Chremonidean War against Antigonos Gonatas, king of Macedon.Certain aspects of the Athenian relationship with the various monarchs are reflected in the decrees of the assembly, passed in honour of royal officials, as well as in the decrees conferring the highest honours (proedriaof the games,sitesisin thePrytaneion, and a statue) upon Athenian citizens who belonged to a king's court. My purpose is to examine precisely the image that Athens projects through the above-mentioned decrees with regard to its relations with the various rulers and their officials; and these in relation to its perception of its own position on the military and political scene on different historical occasions. (shrink)

Who bears responsibility for the actions of a city or state? Is it the entity that we sometimes call a nation? Or the individual members of the nation? Shakespeare’s Henry V includes a brief interchange the night before the battle at Agincourt that addresses this question. A disguised king and the common soldiers of his army debate who is responsible for the deaths that will occur during the forthcoming battle if the war they are fighting is unjust: the (...) class='Hi'>king or his soldiers? Who will be punished on Judgment Day? The interchange opens up reflections on the challenge of deciding who acts when a state acts. Henry V is a play that emphasizes the role of the imagination as central to both stagecraft and the politics of creating a nation. Engaging with the medieval theory of the “king’s two bodies,” the Henry of Shakespeare’s play is caught between the desire to be the embodiment of the imagined nation and yet be his own “natural person” when questions of responsibility for the actions of the nation emerge. Dependent on the imagination to build a unified nation of diverse peoples, Henry desires to escape responsibility for the potentially unjust actions of the nation by focusing on the private actions of his individual subjects. The play thereby brings questions of responsibility for the actions of collective bodies founded by the imagination to the fore and forces us to explore who is responsible when states or nations act. (shrink)

"Responding to the unprecedented violence of our times, and the corresponding interest in nonviolent solutions, this book takes up the heart of pacifism: its critique of what pacifists have termed the war system. Pacifism as War Abolitionism provides an account of the war system that draws on contemporary sociology, history, and political philosophy. The core of its critique of that system is that war begets war, and hence war will not be ended--or even constrained--by finding more principled ways to fight (...) war, as many imagine. War can only be ended by ending the war system, which can only be done nonviolently. This has been the message of pacifism's great voices like Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dorothy Day. It is the principal message of this book. Key Features: Draws extensively on the sociological and historical research on war to expand the usual philosophical discussion beyond hypothetical accounts ; Expands the dialogues on the ethics of war beyond just war theory to its principal alternative: pacifism ; Engages discussion of empire and imperialism in relation to the logic and development of the war system ; Presents pacifism's response to the reality of war today, including the idea of 'never-ending war"--. (shrink)

In 135b.c., unable to endure the treatment of their master Damophilus, a group of slaves, urged on by the wonder-worker Eunus, captured the city of Enna in Eastern Sicily in a night-time raid. The subsequent war, according to our sources the largest of its kind in antiquity, raged for three years, destroying the armies of Roman praetors, and engaging three consecutive consuls in its eventual suppression. The success of the rebels in holding out for years against a progression of Roman (...) armies indicates the importance of the event, and the capabilities of their leaders. One expects the man capable of leading such a revolt to have been exceptional, and in this respect the ancient accounts do not disappoint: in a narrative replete with larger-than-life characters, ranging from the depraved slave-owner Damophilus (Diod. Sic. 34/5.2.10, 35–8) to the restrained Roman consul Calpurnius Piso (Val. Max. 4.3.10), one figure stands out in Diodorus Siculus' depiction: the leader of the slaves. This man, Eunus, whom Diodorus describes as the leader of the event he calls the (first) Sicilian Slave War, has been variously interpreted in modern scholarship. Analyses have fallen into two (not mutually exclusive) categories. On the one hand, the hostile and outlandish account of Diodorus is accepted uncritically, with the details of Eunus' character understood as faithful, historical representations. On the other hand, the negative facets of Eunus' character are reinterpreted in a positive historical context, thereby outlining his suitability and capability to lead such a large and successful insurgency against Rome. Indeed, Urbainczyk recently argued that despite the difficulties in saying anything definite about the leaders of the so-called Sicilian Slave Wars ‘[Diodorus] attributed to [Eunus] all the powers, abilities, wisdom, and cunning that challenges to the status quo had to have in order to succeed’. (shrink)

WE SCHOLARS WHO WRITE ABOUT THE Republic have found much to say about the education of Plato’s warriors. We carefully and thoughtfully relate their virtues to those of the Republic ’s philosopher-kings, and even to those of Plato’s Socrates. We have found much less to say about Plato’s peculiar account of that for which they are educated— war. I agree with Leon Craig that war and spiritedness are central to the argument of the Republic. Indeed, I will contend, Socrates’ three (...) different accounts of war reflect and, in a way, complete the central argument of the Republic. Yet Craig and other modern scholars of the cultivation of Plato’s warriors have very little to say on Socrates’ three accounts of the city at war. (shrink)

The monograph considers the relationships of ethical systems in the ancient Near East through a study of warfare in Judah, Israel and Assyria in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. It argues that a common cosmological and ideological outlook generated similarities in ethical thinking. In all three societies, the mythological traditions surrounding creation reflect a strong connection between war, kingship and the establishment of order. Human kings’ military activities are legitimated through their identification with this cosmic struggle against chaos, begun (...) by the divine king at creation. Military violence is thereby cast not only as morally tolerable but as morally imperative. Deviations from this point of view reflect two phenomena: the preservation of variable social perspectives and the impact of historical changes on ethical thinking. The research begins the discussion of ancient Near Eastern ethics outside of Israel and Judah and fills a scholarly void by placing Israelite and Judahite ethics within this context, as well as contributing methodologically to future research in historical and comparative ethics. (shrink)

Prima facie, Confucianism does not explicitly encourage war given its emphasis on humanity. This, however, may be overlooked. This paper is to examine the correlation between war and Confucianism and to argue that Confucianism should take some, if not primary, blame for the vicious circles of China's war and chaos for more than two millennia. To see the correlation, we explore two readings—top-down and bottom-up—from two sources of Confucianism—Great Learning and Mencius respectively. The top-down reading is this: from a ruler's (...) point of view, a czar has a moral obligation to maintain world peace by force if necessary, whereas the bottom-up is this: from the people's point of view, war is a necessary means to remove non-ren (or atrocious) kings. Since Confucianism is the cardinal philosophy in the second half of Chinese history plus the interaction of its two momentums (or readings), it is not too hard to realize that it could easily sustain war. If so, it makes no sense to say that Confucianism should not bear any responsibility for the vicious circles of war and chaos in the second half. Finally, given the account, we also explore an intriguing and imminent worry—whether the rise of China will threaten world peace. (shrink)

contents -/- i. death and the mask ii. shifts in the TTC ad-space iii. a virus in a superposition iv. this virus has totally hacked us v. a test of Bayesian competence vi. a siege on the Local, by the Global vii. re lab-leak theory: God did it viii. we held ourselves apart by this telescope ix. Google knows we'll all be dead x. Uber gets us all to surveil xi. Netflix pretends to be my friend xii. can teleCOMM map (...) my interior? xiii. Library's a hi-rise, in lockdown xiv. so could the A.I. announce itself xv. N_BossTRON, Surveillance Daemon xvi. prediction markets make War Profiteers xvii. hide Fish in sea, Bird in forest xviii. the DJ and the human, too much credit xix. dumb TV, an ingenious production xx. WE THE NORTH xxi. Debt: The First 5,000 Years xxii. Theses on Kingship xxiii. when i google Zeus xxiv. your Hardcore History xxv. consumerism a pacification campaign xxvi. fascism is quiet now xxvii. a Chomsky need keep record. (shrink)

This article presents Kautilya, the most important thinker in the tradition of statecraft in India. Kautilya has influenced ideas of war and violence in much of South- and Southeast Asia and he is of great importance for a comparative understanding of the ethics of war. The violence inflicted by the king on internal and external enemies is pivotal for the maintenance of an ordered society, according to Kautilya. Prudence and treason are hallmarks of Kautilya's world. The article shows that (...) this realist and cynical view of politics is very different from other traditions in India, especially the religious tradition of the epic literature, where war is a game and chivalry is paramount. I conclude that Kautilya's tradition has something in common with the Clausewitzean philosophy of war. (shrink)

Reading Anthony Gregory's massive tome on the development of habeas corpus from fourteenth century England through its incorporation into Common Law, and then into Article One of the US Constitution and finally, down to the Patriot Act and other more recent modifications of the “great writ,” I am reminded of something that I heard as a graduate student many decades ago, when I asked a professor about reading a particularly demanding book. I was urged to plunge into that text, providing (...) I could spare a few months. Unlike the book I asked about then, which was a total waste of time (as I soon discovered), Gregory's study is a monument to meticulous research. (shrink)

This article integrates the history of military theory – and the practical history of military campaigns and battles – within the broader history of knowledge. Challenging ideas that the new natural philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called Scientific Revolution) fostered attempts to make warfare mathematically calculated, it builds on work showing that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy was itself much more subjective than previously thought. It uses the figure of King Frederick II of Prussia (reigned 1740–1786) (...) to link theoretical with practical military knowledge, placing the military treatises read and written by the king alongside the practical example of the Prussian army’s campaign against the Russians in summer 1758 at the height of the Seven Years War (1756–1763), which culminated in the battle of Zorndorf. This article shows that both the theory and practice of war – like other branches of knowledge in the long eighteenth century – were fundamentally shaped by the contemporary search for intellectual order. The inability to achieve this in practice led to a reliance on subjective judgment and individual, local knowledge. Whereas historians have noted attempts in the eighteenth century to calculate probabilities mathematically, this article shows that war continued to be conceived as the domain of fortune, subject to incalculable chance. Answering Steven Shapin’s call to define concretely “the subjective element in knowledge-making,” the examples of Frederick and his subordinate, Lieutenant General Count Christoph zu Dohna, reveal sharply different contemporary ideas about how to respond to uncertainty in war. Whereas Dohna sought to be ready for chance events and react to them, Frederick actively embraced uncertainty and risk-taking, making chance both a rhetorical argument and a positive choice guiding strategy and tactics. (shrink)

Now in its third year, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine remains at the very top of the international security agenda. This conflict has largely refocused the West's attention away from the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In February 2022, German chancellor Olaf Scholz went so far as to declare that the invasion signaled a zeitenwende, or “dawn of a new era.”1 Russia's aggression and the threat of having to fight a (...) peer or near-peer competitor raises difficult questions, many of which are ethical in nature. The essays gathered in this roundtable seek to provide answers to some of those questions. They are the result of a workshop I organized for the King's College London Centre for Military Ethics in October 2023. One of my ambitions for this workshop was to put leading academics working on the ethics of war into discussion with military practitioners, making sure to include Ukrainian voices. I was very fortunate to succeed in these objectives, and I am convinced that the published essays have benefited enormously from our conversations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ralegh and the Punic WarsCharles G. Salas“For he doth not feign, that rehearseth probabilities as bare conjectures....”Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the WorldThe Secret HistoryIn 1603 Sir Walter Ralegh was judged guilty of treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London to await execution. The wait was a long one —execution did not take place until 1618—giving this artful courtier, warrior, poet, and poseur time to script new (...) roles for himself. The most memorable of these was historian, and the stage on which he performed was the entire world. Universal history had been a time-honored genre in England, but never had there been so remarkable a performance by a native son as Ralegh’s The History of the World (1614). In five books Ralegh offered to king and country his interpretation of events from Creation to 168 bc. Book V, last and lengthiest of the entire work, deals in large part with the struggle between Rome and Carthage. The story of that struggle is Ralegh’s most mature historical writing and the most revealing of himself, for when he gave up his plan to carry his history into modern times, the Punic Wars became the context for things about the present that he was loath to leave unsaid.Despite its length (about a million words) and premature ending, the History was an enormous success with a public eager to possess the meaning of it all. Oliver Cromwell particularly liked the way it followed “the strange windings and turnings of Providence”; 1 no doubt he found Ralegh’s emphasis upon the Providential control of events reassuring. For Ralegh claimed to show how “kings and kingdoms have flourished and fallen, and for what virtue and piety God made prosperous, and for what vice and deformity he made wretched both the one and the other.” 2 In fact what Ralegh showcased [End Page 195] were the acts of a vengeful, Old Testament God more concerned with punishing monarchical sins than with making monarchs prosperous, and the History was temporarily suppressed by James for being “too saucy in censoring princes.” 3If the king did not like what he saw in the History, the king’s critics did; and Ralegh, never a friend to Puritan or republican in his lifetime, became a hero to both as a pious author and victim of Stuart tyranny. Those sympathetic to the Stuarts, like Alexander Ross, Chaplain to Charles I, saw Ralegh rather differently; but the popularity of the man and his History could not be denied. Ross himself profited from that popularity by doing both an abridgment and a continuation of the History as well as Som Animadversions and Observations upon Sir Walter Raleigh’s Historie of the World. Wherein his mistakes are noted, and som doubtful passages cleered (1653). Many of these animadversions were directed at Ralegh’s treatment of the Punic Wars. Ross recognized that “mistakes” and “doubtful passages” there formed a pattern: “Sir Walter cannot look upon the Roman Glorie with but a squint eye”(8), he complained. But did he also recognize the reason for that squint eye, that Ralegh kept one eye on the past and the other on the present? That many of those “doubtful passages” were in fact strategic elements in a campaign (based on parallels) against Rome, against James, and against James’s ministry? Had this been obvious to Ross, he still would not have said so. Writing under Cromwell, he could no more afford to complain explicitly about abuse of James than Ralegh, writing under James, could afford to make the abuse explicit.Parallels—implicit or imagined—are part and parcel of Ralegh’s providentialism. In brief: God controls events, God does not change, events do not change. This is not to say that Ralegh believed that God’s control was transparent, that God couldn’t change, or that free will did not exist. Ralegh did not solve the great problems of theology. 4 What he is sure about is that the same sins continue to be punished just as they have always been: “So also hath God punished the same and the like sins in all after-times, and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:After the War DAVID GOMES CÁSSERES invocation: athena for PLP Grey-eyed Athena had no childhood. She stepped out of the old god’s terrible skull a grown young goddess and began her apprenticeship: running sex-driven cults among the hunters and gatherers, collecting snakes and owls, her aegis looming behind the altars, over her priestesses, prophetic crones and breathless temple prostitutes, sacrificed animals bleeding and burnt ears of grain She gained (...) a reputation: she liked clever men, not that way, no, but she did them favors, paid attention to their deeds and needs and risks and wounds and wants. Her admiration was something a clever man could count on; she would give protection, opportunities, good luck. There was a catch, of course: you had to be clever again, you had to keep impressing the grey-eyed one, and so men lasted a while but couldn’t keep it up, and fell, and well, she forgot them. She was busy. But Odysseus: He was another kind. One stratagem after another, he built up so much credit that she saved him even when he disgraced himself one time or another. (Olympus might have disapproved if they’d noticed, but she had walked far away from that rabble of archetypes, totems, fertilities, boogeymen and witch-mothers, nightwalkers, netherdwellers, sexpots and satyrs. She owned her firmament.) Odysseus was something new to her in his little flick of mortality. So when she stood alone in Penelope’s bedchamber watching the reunion, the circling dance of man and woman arion 27.2 fall 2019 step by step negotiating what they knew after so many years their carefulness like oil on water, leveling out the fresh reek of murder from the great hall below them the suitors’ teeth driven into the earthen floor Odysseus striped with their blood Penelope before her loom, many-stringed weapon of her own warfare weaving each other in that long rite of recognition: Her grey eyes saw words forming and fading unsaid As they circled in the salt red sunset Ionian air. And saw the end of her story with Odysseus; goddess and all, it took away her breath. In the end she had this much to show for her years with this clever man: He came home from the war alive, with all his teeth. 2 after the war First published as “Athena,” in Arion 21.3, Winter 2014 telemachus 1. It’s like this. I come to manhood at fourteen and my life’s just misery and shame. There’s no King in Ithaka and my mother, the Queen, is like a prisoner. All our warriors are scattered in the sea somewhere by Athena’s great storm. Our home, the palace of godlike Odysseus, is full of parasites and pirates, We live there paralyzed, taunted by those swarming men and the people who cling to them, even some of my mother’s maids, girls my age or a little older— nasty girls who know all the ways to mock and mortify a boy squirming into manhood without a father. Of course I run away, of course I go looking for wily Odysseus, the King, my father. I never find him, it’s for him to find me, later. But I did learn to tie seamen’s knots, and I have a traveler’s tale: One night I was at the house of Menelaus and Helen, drinking good wine late into the night. They sent the servants to bed, and the three of us sat in the red light of the dying fire. Menelaus, still handsome with some grey in his red hair, spoke of my father Odysseus: “Do you know what he said? He said to me, we are better than the gods; we are kings. And kings must die, as the gods cannot. He said it to me when we were striding with our swords in hand through the broken gates of Troy, and as calmly as he might say it to you.” As he spoke, Menelaus of the great war-cry was fondling the arm of his wife, Helen, for whose beauty all that blood was shed. I was sitting with the people the poets sing... (shrink)

The character of the scholarly patronage community of Jixia in the Warring States polity of Qi has been hotly debated. Was it indeed an “academy,” as it has been retrospectively dubbed? What kind of activities did resident scholars engage in? What teachings did they propound, what writings did they compose? Following the lead of research by Nathan Sivin and Andrew S. Meyer, the present article does not treat Jixia as an academy proper, but assumes that it was a patronage community (...) sponsored by the Tian/Chen clan. Rather than indulge in more speculations about institutional arrangements and the activities of specific scholars, however, it is argued that intertextual relationships are more likely to shed light on the intellectual concerns of scholars at Jixia. To demonstrate the viability of such an approach, this article analyzes dialogues between King Xuan of Qi and Master Meng in the book Mengzi, demonstrating that they can be divided into hostile and supportive ones, the latter propounding the principle of “sharing pleasures.” Dialogues included in other compilations that advocate the same principle are then shown to be almost invariably associated with Jixia scholars. The notion of sharing pleasures, it is finally argued, was part of a wider political debate on princely wastefulness that was characteristic of Qi and is likewise reflected in such compilations as Guanzi, Yanzi chunqiu, and Liu tao. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Chinese Just War Ethics: Origin, Development, and Dissent ed. by Ping-Cheung Lo, Sumner B. TwissRosemary B. KellisonChinese Just War Ethics: Origin, Development, and Dissent Edited by Ping-Cheung Lo and Sumner B. Twiss London: Routledge, 2015. 320pp. $160.00As Ping-Cheung Lo notes, Western stereotypes of Chinese culture and particularly of Confucian ethics have led many to describe ancient China as a place of peace and cooperation—a picture that is contrary (...) to historical evidence (249). This new volume, edited by Lo and Sumner Twiss, offers an important corrective to that image. The contributing authors describe the moral attitudes toward war and peace taken by Chinese thinkers in several schools during the Warring States Period of 475–221 BCE (along with one later figure, the sixteenth-century neo-Confucian Wang Yangming). In particular, they focus on five traditions: military strategy, Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, and legalism. The authors collectively demonstrate that ancient Chinese thought was marked by an intense interest in both peace and war, and that these topics were approached from moral as well as strategic and prudential perspectives. Moreover, in their historical contextualization of these materials, the authors emphasize the significance of the reality of war in shaping the arguments discussed. This attention to interpretation and real-life applications of these arguments, in both the ancient world and the contemporary activities of the People’s Liberation Army, is a particular strength of the book.This volume will be of special interest to comparative religious ethicists as well as to those interested in just war reasoning. As the inclusion of the phrase “just war” in the book’s title suggests, the identification of parallels to Western just war thinking in ancient Chinese thought is a major emphasis. Lo argues that although the Seven Military Classics are often read simply as strategy manuals, their discussions of strategy are complemented by concepts similar to the just war criteria of just cause, last resort, and discrimination. Twiss and Jonathan Chan suggest that the Confucian “true king” who is to oversee war [End Page 226] virtuously and with the goal of maintaining an ordered, humane society represents a requirement similar to the just war criterion of right authority; importantly, however, “right” in the Confucian tradition comes from the ruler’s virtue rather than his sovereignty. Hui-chieh Loy’s study of the Mohist tradition identifies concepts similar to six different jus ad bellum criteria while also revealing a lack of jus in bello criteria. Finally, Lo argues for the similarities between ancient legalism and contemporary Western realism as an alternative to just war thinking.Future scholarly development in this area should include a more robust articulation of the purpose of taking this comparative approach. Some reasons are implied in the book. For instance, Twiss and Chan argue for the overlap of Confucian punitive expeditions with the contemporary model of responsibility to protect, suggesting the possibility of international consensus on that norm. On the other hand, comparative work always runs the risk of distorting or overlooking material as a result of the desire to identify similarities or differences to a particular framework. Aaron Stalnaker, for example, points out that while Confucian thinker Xunzi may have embraced some concepts similar to those of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, he did not structure his own writing in those terms (135). Similarly, Ellen Zhang argues that the Daodejing differs from just war texts in that it approaches the question of war from the perspective of a particular conception of peace as an absence of coercion; the text thus takes the avoidance of war as its moral ideal. She also suggests that Confucian punitive expeditions may be better understood as domestic criminal discipline than as acts of war or humanitarian intervention (220). The chapters of this book thus provide a helpful and illustrative starting point for the kind of theoretical conversation about comparison mentioned here.Rosemary B. KellisonUniversity of West GeorgiaCopyright © 2016 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In these grim and heavy years, despite all their inroads upon leisure, it seems likely that Shakespeare is read more widely and loved more deeply in this country than for many generations past, and since foreign communiqués as well as British ministers of the crown have been known to quote from him, it may be conjectured that the world as well as these islands is sensible of a part of the debt that humanity owes him. Be that as it may, (...) there is perennial refreshment in the blended wit and wisdom and fancy of his immortal pages, and a timely privilege for his countrymen in the fact that his Histories dealt with anguished, bitter years. To be sure, we read him more for his timelessness than for his timeliness, and allow, with the speaker in King John that ‘He is but a bastard to the times, That doth not smack of observation.’ Such observation is just philosophy ; but even philosophy reacts to the stimulus of its immediate environment. (shrink)

Master Sun's _The Art of War_ is by no means the only ancient Chinese treatise on military affairs. One chapter in the _Huainanzi_, an important compendium of philosophy and political theory written in the second century B.C.E., synthesizes the entire corpus of military literature inherited from the Chinese classical era. Drawing on all major, existing military writings, as well as other lost sources, it assesses tactics and strategy, logistics, organization, and political economy, as well as cosmology and the fundamental morality (...) of warfare. This powerful work set out to become the last word on military matters, subsuming and replacing all preceding literature. Written under the sponsorship of Liu An, king of Huainan, the _Huainanzi_'s "military methods" emphasize the preservation of peace as the ultimate value to be served by the military, insisting that the army can be effectively and rightly used only when defending the sacred hereditary position of the emperor and his vassals. This position stands in stark contrast to that of _The Art of War_, which prioritizes the enrichment and empowerment of the state. Liu An's philosophy also argues that military success depends on the personal cultivation of the commander and that deception is not enough to secure victory. Only a commander with the exceptional qualities of insight and cognition, developed through a program of meditative practice and yogic refinement, can effectively control and interpret the strategic situation. Andrew Seth Meyer offers both a full translation of this text and an extensive analysis of its historical context. His thorough treatment relates Liu An's teachings to issues in Chinese philosophy, culture, religion, and history, helping to interpret their uncommon message. (shrink)

My dissertation combines a historical case study with an argument derived from the philosophy of science. Why do states act the way they do, and how should foreign policy actions be explained? I begin by showing how existing explanations advanced both by historians and social scientists have problems incorporating intentional factors into the framework of their analyses. The historian will always be tempted to overwrite the meanings of the past with the meanings she constructs through her own narrative; the social (...) scientist is tempted to neglect intentions since they don't easily lend themselves to scientific manipulation. ;My own argument begins by trying to make sense of 'meaning.' We create meaning through metaphor and as we expand metaphors into narratives we come to see certain actions as required. Which stories that we do tell about ourselves, however, depends upon the audiences we address. Through our narratives we constantly seek support and recognition. Our narratives consequently perform two tasks. On the one hand they define what our interests are, but on the other hand, they also define our identities. On this basis I develop two different models for explaining action: one which explains action as undertaken in defense of interests, the other as undertaken in defense of an identity. ;The historical case study explains why Sweden went to war in 1630. Although historians traditionally have explained the action as undertaken for various economic, political or military reasons, I show that none of these factors can account for the intervention. 'Interests' were not at stake. Instead the action is best explained as a defense of a particular definition of a Swedish national identity. The country, and especially its king, was denied recognition as a legitimate actor in international politics, and it went to war in order to force the European powers to grant them the recognition that hadn't been granted freely. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:After Thermopylae: The Oath of Plataea and the End of the Graeco-Persian Wars by Paul CartledgeMatthew A. SearsPaul Cartledge. After Thermopylae: The Oath of Plataea and the End of the Graeco-Persian Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. xxx + 203 pp. 4 black-and-white maps, 9 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $24.95.This brief book employs the controversial fourth-century Oath of Plataea, inscribed on stone in the Attic deme of Acharnae, as (...) a hook on which to hang a lively and surprisingly thorough treatment of the Persian Wars—and Classical Greek history more generally. Writing for Oxford’s “Emblems of Antiquity” series, Cartledge aims to educate a wide general audience, an audience this book certainly deserves.From the outset, Cartledge wades into the interminable debate concerning which ancient battle, especially those of the Graeco-Persian wars, was most important for subsequent Western history. With Herodotus, many consider the Athenian-dominated Salamis to be the decisive clash, although, as Cartledge rightly reminds the reader, the largely Spartan victory at Plataea was the final triumph of the Greeks over the Persians. Even after Salamis, it was a close-run thing; Plataea ensured that the Persian king would never again send his armies into mainland Greece. Cartledge, though, does not provide a straightforward narrative of the Battle of Plataea nor of the wider struggle between the patriotic Greek poleis and the immense empire of Darius and Xerxes. Rather, he situates the Battle of Plataea and Athens’ commemoration of it on stone within a much broader context of Greek history in order to reveal how the Greeks remembered— and at times vigorously contested—their own past.After a very clear introductory chapter, with a succinct statement of the book’s main themes, chapter 2 provides a close reading of the inscription itself, along with a useful introduction to epigraphy. Cartledge takes the majority opinion concerning the oath’s historicity, namely, that the oath is literally and verbally inauthentic and belongs not to 479, but is rather an emblem of fourth-century Athenian propaganda. Several factors tell against reading the inscription as an accurate reflection of something that was sworn by the Greeks before the battle, including the conspicuous absence of this particular oath from fifth-century literary sources and the peculiar blending of military titles on the stone, such as the Athenian taxiarch with the Spartan enomotarch. In order to provide context for the oath’s inscription and presentation in Acharnae, Cartledge outlines the post-479 Greek world, highlighting Athenian self-presentation in the period after the [End Page 489] King’s Peace and during the Lycurgan era. The stele seems to have been inscribed shortly after Chaeronea, when the need for propaganda extolling the glorious Athenian past had never been greater. The ephebic oath that also appears on the stele, which implies a movement for military reform, reinforces Cartledge’s impression that the politically and militarily precarious situation after 338 was the background for this inscription. The technocrat Lycurgus, who dominated Athens in this period, was a great admirer of Sparta, which might partly explain why the Spartan-led triumph of Plataea, along with the Spartan-inspired institution of the ephebeia, feature prominently on this monument supposedly designed to highlight the past achievements of Athens.Chapter 3 treats the oath as a religious document. Along with some general observations about Greek religious practice, Cartledge focuses on Athena and Ares, the two gods explicitly mentioned in connection with the oath. That Athena should appear is hardly surprising, but Cartledge pauses briefly over the inclusion of Ares, who, despite being a full member of the Olympian pantheon, was rarely invoked directly by the Greeks. In the martial context of this inscription, however, Ares’ presence makes a great deal of sense, especially alongside the warrior goddess Athena. The chapter ends with an interesting discussion of stasis as a consequence of poor religious observance. As Cartledge reminds us, the Athenians, with their sometimes tumultuous political history, most obviously in the wake of the Peloponnesian War, would have been particularly keen to avoid stasis and the religious impiety that leads to it. In our age of skepticism, it... (shrink)

Belief in propositions has had a long and distinguished history in analytic philosophy. Three of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore, believed in propositions. Many philosophers since then have shared this belief; and the belief is widely, though certainly not universally, accepted among philosophers today. Among contemporary philosophers who believe in propositions, many, and perhaps even most, take them to be structured entities with individuals, properties, and relations as constituents. For example, the (...) proposition that Glenn loves Tracy has Glenn, the loving relation, and Tracy as constituents. What is it, then, that binds these constituents together and imposes structure on them? And if the proposition that Glenn loves Tracy is distinct from the proposition that Tracy loves Glenn yet both have the same constituents, what is about the way these constituents are structured or bound together that makes them two different propositions? In The Nature and Structure of Content, Jeffrey C. King formulates a detailed account of the metaphysical nature of propositions, and provides fresh answers to the above questions. In addition to explaining what it is that binds together the constituents of structured propositions and imposes structure on them, King deals with some of the standard objections to accounts of propositions: he shows that there is no mystery about what propositions are; that given certain minimal assumptions, it follows that they exist; and that on his approach, we can see how and why propositions manage to have truth conditions and represent the world as being a certain way. The Nature and Structure of Content also contains a detailed account of the nature of tense and modality, and provides a solution to the paradox of analysis. Scholars and students working in the philosophy of mind and language will find this book rewarding reading. (shrink)

Philosophy, science, and common sense all refer to propositions--things we believe and say, and things which are true or false. But there is no consensus on what sorts of things these entities are. Jeffrey C. King, Scott Soames, and Jeff Speaks argue that commitment to propositions is indispensable, and each defend their own views on the debate.