Philosophy After Hiroshima

This book offers a philosophical analysis of the issues surrounding war and peace, and their challenges to ethics. It recalls the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the beginning of the nuclear age, the Cold War, and subsequently of the American Empire. It traces connections between those events and the present 21st century wars, such as the U.S. invasion in Iraq and 'the global war on terrorism', as a continuation of hegemonic power politics. The book draws on the responses to the emergence of nuclear warfare by Camus, Sartre, Russell, Heidegger, Jaspers and other philosophers, which help us assess the current escalation of global violence. In the nuclear age, the use of military force as a political instrument threatens the future of humanity. This poses formidable challenges to philosophy and calls for its transformation. The contributors examine the problems of war and peace, human rights, toleration, the politics of memory, intercultural dialogue, the ethics of co-responsibility, and cosmopolitan order. Drawing on a vast range of philosophical traditions - Taoist and Western - they show the relevance of an ethics of nonviolence in search for peaceful alternatives. In going beyond postmodernism, the authors develop a postcritical, constructive paradigm of thinking, as a transition from the philosophy of analysis to the philosophy of synthesis and the philosophy of the possible. They outline a new, possibilistic methodology in the humanities based on conceptual constructivism. Philosophy is viewed as a peace-promoting global dialogue.