Harry van der Linden

Following international humanitarian law, soldiers who are authorized by their states to fight wars of aggression have a legal right to kill enemy soldiers, and even enemy civilians, as long as they respect such jus in bello norms as discrimination and proportionality. I criticize a variety of arguments in support of this “combatant’s privilege” of aggressor soldiers that maintain that these soldiers have a moral right to kill or are not culpable for their wrongful killing. I also contest some arguments in support of the view that even though soldiers executing wars of aggression may be morally liable for their wrongful killing, it is impractical or dangerous to seek to change international law so that they would also be held legally liable. In conclusion, I cautiously articulate some conditions under which combatant’s privilege should not be legally granted and those who fight unjust wars should be prosecuted.

The theme of the 6th biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, held at Howard University in Washington, D.C. in November 2004, was "Philosophy Against Empire." The U.S. imperial project, pursued by both Republican and Democratic administrations, has many dimensions, including military force and the mechanisms for its legitimation; the global economy and flows of money and people across borders; and biopolitics, or the disciplining of bodies through the micro-mechanisms of power apart from traditional forms of sovereignty. These issues are explored in depth in these collected and revised essays from the Conference, along with the forms of subjectivity that can resist and respond to the alienation produced within and by the imperial project, toward the creation of an alternative global order. Authors include Karsten Struhl, Ann Ferguson, Edmund Byrne, David Cormier, Harry Targ, Jo-Ann Pilardi, Lucinda Joy Peach, Devin Zane Shaw, Tzuchien Tho, Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Schmitt, Richard Jones, Richard Peterson, Peter Amato, William McBride, Omar Dahbour, Kory Schaff, David Schweickart, and Carol Gould.

This detailed study examines the close cooperation between the two main figures of the Marburg School, Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, primarily from the time that Natorp came to the University of Marburg in 1880 to write his Habilitationsschrift under Cohen until Cohen’s resignation from Marburg in 1912. It is a common view that during this period Cohen and Natorp were of one philosophical mind: Cohen developed the basic premises of Marburg Kantianism, first in his explications of Kant’s three Critiques, and later in his own philosophical system [Logic of Pure Cognition, Ethics of the Pure Will, and Aesthetics of Pure Feeling ], while Natorp used these premises in his historical studies and in the construction of his social pedagogy. On this account, it was not until Cohen’s departure from Marburg, or even not until the latter’s death, that Natorp’s philosophy began to differentiate clearly from Cohen’s, taking an increasingly metaphysical-mystical turn. Holzhey successfully undermines this view. He shows that during Cohen’s Marburg period Natorp was actually critical of some basic aspects of Cohen’s epistemic logic, ethics, and philosophy of religion, but that Natorp underplayed his disagreements and largely kept them from becoming public.