Abstract

This essay advances an innovative perspective on war by defining it not as an extension of individual aggressiveness but as public intergroup violence, the product of collective intelligence and force. War is qualitatively distinct from interpersonal conflicts, since it presupposes technical and symbolic organization, shared memory and ideology, strategic coordination, and political legitimation. Thus, the naturalization of war and peace, through theodicies or anthropologies, is rejected, and its historical-cultural contingency is emphasized, as an epigenetic and technical process of human sociality. By constructing a differentiated typology of violence (intergroup, interpersonal, hybrid, unilateral, pseudo-warlike), the essay offers a new philosophical taxonomy that clarifies the specific sense of war as a motivated, collective, and contingent phenomenon. Peace, in turn, emerges as an anthropological and juridical possibility rooted in civic self-critique, political deliberation, and cooperative capabilities. The original contribution lies in articulating the philosophy of war with cosmopolitan ethics and law, thus providing a conceptual reconstruction of the borders and relationships between violence, war, and peace.