A Comparative Grammar of Just War: Contrasting Augustinian Christian and Vedic Hindu Worldviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines some of the metaphysical assumptions that inform how people think about warfare.In the Christian West, rules on warfare developed into the just war doctrine, and St. Augustine is often acknowledged as the person who introduced these ideas to Western philosophy.However, all of Augustine's thought is rooted in his understanding of reality through the lens of his Christian faith -a fifth century Roman Catholic worldview (Weltanschauung).As a result, current norms in international law on warfare (such as R2P) also reflect these Christian metaphysical assumptions.This dissertation examines not only how Augustinian metaphysical assumptions impact our ideas of warfare in international law but also how these ideas would change if one did not subscribe to this Augustinian worldview.Since Hinduism is often associated with nonviolence, a Hindu worldview is examined to determine what kind of just war theory, if any, would arise.First, the link between Christian philosophy and modern international law is outlined, tracing the development of thought from Augustine to modern times by examining Bible verses and writings by political theorists and others on just war theory and Christian theology.Then, Christian metaphysical assumptions are examined in order to determine how these assumptions influence Christian ideas of warfare.Psychological impacts of Christian assumptions are also looked at through the lens of Girardian analysis.In the second half, Hindu political writings, scriptures and religious texts as well as books about Hinduism are examined to discover how Hindus have thought about war.Hindu metaphysical assumptions are examined and inferences are made to show the connection between these assumptions and Hindu ideas of non-violence.The following aspects are examined in order to see how they generate ideas about war: ontology, creation myths and conceptions about God, the afterlife and end of the world, axiology, praxeology and epistemology.The research shows that Christian metaphysical assumptions (which many Christians now consider outdated) continue to influence modern ideas about war idea while Hindu metaphysical assumptions tend to influence the kind of non-aggression associated with Gandhi.I would like to thank my adviser, Peter Emberley, for piquing my interest in Political Theory and the connection between religion and political science.Also, many thanks to Noel Salmond for his extensive comments, insightful feedback and meticulous editing
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".