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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. A Modern Investiture: National Sovereignty versus International Law
Chapter 1. Sovereign Demonology: The State of Exception(alism)
Chapter 2. Challenge or Twin? The Global Rule of Law
Part II. Heresies: Liberal(-Marxist) and Christian Ethics of War
Chapter 3. Machiavelli for Everyone! Human Rights Reconsidered
Chapter 4. Christian Ethics: Paul Ramsey’s Theo-Logics of War Haunted by Hegel and Nietzsche
Part III. Theo–Logics of Mediation
Chapter 5. An Eschatological Fusion—Oliver O’Donovan’s Evangelical Ethics of War
Chapter 6. Mediations: History, Grace and Combat
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Therese Feiler is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Systematic Theology and Ethics at the Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultät, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany.
Summary
The modern ethics of war is a field of disparate, competing voices based on often unexplored theological and metaphysical assumptions. Therese Feiler approaches them from the borderline area between systematics, philosophical theology and religious studies. With reference to G. W. F. Hegel's and like-minded thinkers' 'theo–logic' that negotiates Christ’s mediation and immanent dialectics, Feiler identifies the logic and problem of mediation as the core concern of political ethics.
Feiler unites five representative authors from now disparate strands of contemporary just war ethics, testing whether they offer a meaningful possibility of mediation and subsequent reconciliation: a sovereign realist and a cosmopolitan idealist; a rationalist individualist, an idealist Christian ethicist, and finally, an evangelical theologian. Opening the just war debate for comparative critical engagement, Feiler creates a fascinating study that locates a “dynamic point” at which faithful, free political action can be wrestled from irony, tragedy, and melancholic inertia in the face of totalitarian suffocation.
Foreword
Critically compares theological and philosophical just war proposals on logical and Christological grounds
