History of Political Philosophy

Course title: The problem of war and the paths to peace.

The aim of the course is to carefully reconstruct some philosophical debates on the problem of war and peace. After a general introduction on the different perspectives from which the problem can be approached and on some key-concepts necessary to address it (e.g., that of legitimacy and that of legality), the lectures will start from Augustine's theses, which overthrow the pacifist convictions of most of the Church Fathers preceding him. The permissibility of recourse to war for Christians, when certain precise conditions are met, will be analyzed by examining both legal texts, such as the so-called Decretum Gratiani, and theological texts, such as the Summa of Thomas. Within the sphere of modern philosophical thought, to which a series of lectures will be devoted, inevitable selections will be made: on the one hand, the elaboration of an articulate and precise theory of "just war" by thinkers such as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez will be considered; on the other hand, the theses that, beginning with Hobbes, deny the possibility of distinguishing, in a "Westphalian" context of sovereign states, between just and unjust wars will be analyzed. Ample emphasis will then be given to Kant's position, which confronts in an original way the different traditions of natural law thought and elaborates a Project of Perpetual Peace, of great philosophical significance. The last part of the course will examine some reflections, on the problems of legitimacy and legality of contemporary wars, which have developed during the twentieth century in different philosophical contexts, from the French one in which the philosophical meditation of Simone Weil stands out, to the German one, with the elaborations of Sigmund Freud, Carl Schmitt, and Hans Kelsen, among others. The discontinuity represented by atomic warfare, the use of the nuclear weapon, will then be analyzed from multiple perspectives, referring to important texts by Karl Jaspers, Günther Anders and Bertrand Russell. In the concluding lectures of the course, on the one hand, a number of theses advocated by thinkers in the twentieth-century pacifist tradition (such as Gandhi, Andrea Caffi, Aldo Capitini) will be illustrated, and on the other hand, the philosophical re-legitimization of war, which has taken place in recent decades with the theorization of so-called "humanitarian interventions," will be critically examined.