Phenomenology of War: Imagining the Future, Interrupting the Present

Description du projet

Comprendre la guerre au-delà de la nature et de la culture

Malgré sa présence persistante, la guerre reste l’une des dimensions les moins bien comprises de l’existence humaine. S’agit-il d’un instinct naturel ou d’un produit de la culture et de la technologie? Soutenu par le programme Actions Marie Skłodowska-Curie, le projet POW explore cette question sous un angle philosophique. Les chercheurs viseront à dépasser les explications naturalistes ou anti-naturalistes simplistes. Plus précisément, il s’agira d’élaborer le premier compte rendu phénoménologique systématique de la guerre. S’inspirant à la fois de la philosophie et des études stratégiques, le projet traite la guerre comme un phénomène complexe et liminal, ni totalement naturel ni purement culturel. Dans l’ensemble, POW remet en question les hypothèses dogmatiques et cherche à remodeler la façon dont nous comprenons les conflits dans le monde d’aujourd’hui.

Objectif

The aim of “Phenomenology of War: Imagining the Future, Interrupting the Present” (POW) is to offer the first systematic phenomenological treatment of war. Is war a phenomenon pertaining to the state of nature or the most extreme manifestation of the human potential for technological destruction? One of the working premises of POW is that both the naturalism and anti-naturalism of much contemporary philosophy are unable to account for the war-phenomenon since both tend to eliminate the human factor from their considerations of human relations. Naturalism tends to assimilate any distinctive human feature to impersonal natural dynamics. Anti-naturalism tends to interpret the human condition according to artificial human productions. The question whether war pertains to nature or culture remains essentially open today. As a central part of the project, POW will pay close attention to contemporary strategic and security studies. The multidisciplinary nature of these studies shall offer the empirical foundation to counter naïve and dogmatic presuppositions about what war should or should not be. POW aims to account for the war-phenomenon by recovering the original diversity of data in the realm of human warfare and by exploring war as a liminal phenomenon between nature and culture. To achieve the project objectives, the support of my supervisor at the UniTo (Prof. Gaetano Chiurazzi) and training in strategic studies at the Interdepartmental School in Strategic Studies (SUISS) at UniTo and at the National Defence University (NDU) in Helsinki will be crucial. By deepening my philosophical background and branching out to military studies, POW will enable me to recover the full originality and complexity of the human factor that lies at the heart of the war-phenomenon, resulting in the first phenomenological account of the historical and anthropological particularity of this characteristic mode of human relations.