Abstract

This dissertation is about the essence of war. War has a dual nature---it is both a physical and cognitive phenomenon. It includes physical objects such as soldiers, tanks, aircraft, and bombs. It also includes physical processes such as tactical maneuvers, battles, and campaigns. However, it also has a non-physical side derived from the cognitive operations of the participants. This includes the soldiers, planners, and countrymen . How wars are planned for, carried out, and even just thought of results in the cognitive features. It is this side of war I will analyze in the following dissertation. ;Furthermore, this dissertation is about the invariant features of war. In what follows I will elucidate what is constant in war---i.e. what is not subject to change regardless of technological, cultural, and political changes. To do this I apply the eidetic reduction to warfare. Husserl's eidetic reduction helps us to analyze objects and events by removing the temporally relative facts and elucidating the essential features of the remainder---i.e. the Husserlian phenomenologist is after the eidos, or essence, of that which is observed. This includes the technique of imaginative variation, wherein one analyzes an object or phenomenon from different perspectives, e.g. if we were to analyze a thousand wars, we would be able to identify those features that are constant or essential. ;The eidetic reduction in the case of war results in a stratified ontology, with similarities to Ingarden's analysis of literary works of art. His analysis of these abstract artifacts takes into account the supervening qualities of human intentional states upon physical features. Furthermore, Ingarden's concept of stratification applies to wars, governments, fraternities, congressional sessions, and tracts of real estate alike.His analysis is relevant because literary works maintain a dual nature. That is to say, we consider them to be abstract artifacts with both physical and cognitive features. Ingarden calls the literary work of art a "stratified polyphonic harmony." The goal then is to show how the different strata of war make up one whole.