The Philosophy of War and Exile

by Nolen Gertz

Arguing that the suffering of combatants is better understood through philosophy than psychology, as not trauma, but exile, this book investigates the experiences of torturers, UAV operators, cyberwarriors, and veterans to reveal not only the exile at the core of becoming a combatant, but the evasion from exile at the core of being a noncombatant.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

221 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Nolen Gertz is Associate Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Twente, and the author of Nihilism (MIT Press, 2019), Nihilism and Technology (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), and The Philosophy of War and Exile: From the Humanity of War to the Inhumanity of Peace (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014).

He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from The New School for Social Research in 2012. His research interests include applied ethics, social and political philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, and aesthetics. He has written for the media analyses of military robots, humanitarian drones, and Facebook. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and on the ABC Australia website. He has been interviewed by the BBC World Service, Austrian Public Radio, Ireland’s National Independent Radio, and France’s Philosophie Magazine.

He is the Coordinator of the 4TU Task Force on Risk, Safety and Security, and a Research Associate in Military Ethics at the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University. He is on the Editorial Review Board for Rowman & Littlefield International’s book series Off the Fence: Morality, Politics and Society.

Reviews

[Ash Higgins]

Full Disclosure, I did some consulting on this one.

Gertz identifies a massive massive blind spot in how we think about war in this work.

You have your Just War Theory and you have PTSD Theory and for some reason these two concepts are thought of as wildly separate when they couldn't be more related.

In fact Just War Theory doesn't really *allow* for PTSD to exist; if the cause was righteous, combatants should feel awesome about that regardless of any actions taken.

Then the exile part; all the bad of war is placed on the combatants and the all the good feelings of honor and victory can be enjoyed by everyone widening the military/civilian divide.