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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Despite the high seriousness and obviously increasing importance of international politics in our time, something recognizable as a philosophy of the subject, in the view of some scholars, has not yet succeeded in emerging from the demise of “banal” positivism. This lamentable and barely explicable state of affairs has led several philosophically inclined scholars to urge the search for a philosophy of international relations. The form, scope and content of the proposed philosophy have received less attention; the philosophers in question have been content to limit their philosophical inquiry to a species of historical-philosophical archaeology consisting of, for example, the uncovering of Kant's conception of philosophical reason as it relates to international relations or, the recovery of “the just war for classical theory” or, the discovery tout court of a conception of “justice” for international relations. Without putting such indispensable efforts at risk or preempting the results of such scholarship, I see two obstacles to their success. First, there has been little or no comparable effort directed toward indicating, except in highly schematic form, what any such philosophy might consist in and, secondly, it is still unclear what relationship there could be between any such proposed philosophy and alternative conceptions of international relations such as empirical systems theory.
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