War: Violence and Technics in the West (The Works of Emanuele Severino)

The first English translation of Emanuele Severino’s provocative analysis of the philosophy behind war in the West. Drawing on a broad range of sources, from Heraclitus to 20th-century grassroots movements, Italy’s foremost philosopher calls for a new way of thinking that could lead the West to perpetual peace.War, for Severino, is not merely the manifestation of conflict through violence to resolve disputes between nations or fractions.Rather it is a mode of thought deeply embedded in the foundations of Western civilisation.Highlighting the divisive and isolating mechanisms that the West uses to conceptualize their bases of power, War shows that this divisive thought is so intrinsic to Western philosophy that even critiques of war are warlike.For peace to be possible, we need more then ceasefires; we need a fundamental re-evaluation of the history of Western thought. Originally written in the geopolitical context of the 1990s, Severino’s text retains an extraordinary urgency at a time