Montag, 06. Juni 2016, 09:15 - 16:30 iCal

Moralities of Warfare

The Committed Soldier
June 6-7, 2016

Seminarraum am Institut für Ethik und Recht in der Medizin (Alte Kapelle)
Spitalgasse 2-4 / Hof 2.8, 1090 Wien

Tagung, Konferenz, Kongress, Symposium


Weitere Termine

Dienstag, 07. Juni 2016, 09:30 - 13:00

Moralities of committed soldiers. An interdisciplinary approach

 

This project brings together scientists from history, history of the church, philosophy, and sociology. Together, the authors explore how soldiers have been motivated in warfare. Historical examples are drawn from WWI, WWII, and the Vietnam War. The investigation of warfare focuses on the big religious and secular narratives that support soldiers in regarding their duties as reasonable and as a contribution to a meaningful event. In exploring the soldier’s perspective, authors from moral philosophy and from the Just War Tradition (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas) also focus on re-interpreting the justifying horizons of warfare. Overall, the authors can build on a recent turn in war theory that already explores war with emphasis on the single soldier and the roles of combatants in war.

 

This is the leading hypothesis in the research project: Even though soldiers need to function as a cog of a machine, they also need to regard their deeds as meaningful in the light of narratives. These narratives shall be explored against an interdisciplinary theoretical background. In particular, the interfaces between the disciplines are provided by some version of the “moralities of warfare”, whereas “morality” is a broad concept that includes an interpretation of war as a somehow reasonable event. Historians, sociologists, theologians and philosophers provide different approaches to explaining the perspective of soldiers. They also try to integrate the single viewpoint into a context that sheds new lights on the interpretation of killing in war and of contributing to warfare.

 

 

Zur Webseite der Veranstaltung


Veranstalter

Angela Kallhoff und Thomas Schulte-Umberg / Universität Wien


Kontakt

Michaela Bartsch
Institut für Philosophie der Uni Wien
DW 46 410
michaela.bartsch@univie.ac.at