The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World
By Rupert Smith, finished Friday 18 July 2008
A fascinating treatise on modern warfare, The Utility of Force should be read not merely in every military staff college but in the halls of Westminster, Brussels and Washington. Conflict now permeates international relations: the last twenty years have seen military interventions by Western powers in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the intifada in Palestine and a spilling-over of that conflict into Lebanon.
General Smith argues that our failure to resolve these situations owes much to our shortsightedness about the very nature of warfare: that the paradigm of industrial warfare is dead, and that we live in an era of “war amongst the people”. Force must now be employed not as a solution in itself but as one component of a holistic approach including elements appropriate to the specific circumstances at hand, whether they be humanitarian, administrative or diplomatic.
Reviewing the history of warfare from Napoleon onwards, the book demonstrates the links between the emerging paradigm of industrial war and the formation of the modern nation-state. One classic example is the alliance of nationalistic politics and military service which empowered Prussia during the German wars of unification. By handing the people a stake in their own future, the state was able to swell the ranks of its military with conscript soldiers without inciting revolution.
Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football
By David Winner, finished Wednesday 25 June 2008
Physicalism, or Something Near Enough
By Jaegwon Kim, finished Friday 20 June 2008
Kim takes Chalmers-style zombies to be conceptually untenable, writing that
Zombies are indistinguishable from us in their speech behavior, and we must regard them as genuine language users. Among the assertions they make are “My elbow hurts,” “This mosquito bite is really itchy,” and the like; they make phenomenal assertions of the sort we make, and do so under similar conditions. Moreover, their phenomenal assertions are not easily isolated; they are integrated smoothly and seamlessly with other parts of their discourse. To hold onto the zombie hypothesis, we must apply a massive “error theory” to these creatures—namely that all their (positive) phenomenal assertions are false. I believe that this is incoherent. We must grant that the creatures have inner consciousness, although the qualitative character of their consciousness remains undetermined.
However, he accepts the plausibility of qualia inversion, leaving us with an epiphenomenalist view in which qualia are irreducible but all other mental states are functionally reducible.