The Ivory Tower Under Fire: Why Philosophy Still Matters in Wartime
By Matthew Parish
Tuesday 13 October 2026
War is an assault upon abstraction. It reduces the elaborate structures of civilisation to brutally immediate questions. Where is the nearest shelter? Is there electricity? Is the bridge still standing? Has the railway line been struck? Is the person who has not answered his telephone alive? In a city under bombardment, the distinction between phenomenology and metaphysics may appear rather less pressing than the distinction between an incoming missile and an outgoing interceptor.
For this reason, philosophers have always been vulnerable to mockery in times of crisis. The philosopher sits in an ancient college, a university library or some comfortably upholstered seminar room, considering questions that may appear fantastically remote from the suffering of the world outside. What is knowledge? What is justice? Does consciousness supervene upon physical states? What does it mean for a proposition to be true? Meanwhile soldiers bleed, civilians flee, politicians quarrel, engineers repair electricity substations and doctors work through the night.
The temptation is therefore to conclude that philosophy is a luxury of peace. This conclusion is profoundly mistaken because the horrors of war reveal precisely why humanity needs its philosophers, including those who inhabit the proverbial ivory towers and devote themselves to abstractions whose practical significance may not become apparent for decades or even centuries.
The ivory tower has acquired an undeservedly sinister reputation. The expression suggests intellectual isolation, privilege and perhaps even irresponsibility, yet there is another way of understanding it. An ivory tower is simply a place in which somebody has been given the extraordinary privilege of thinking about a question without being required to produce an immediate answer useful to somebody else, and civilisation needs such places.
Most human activity is governed by immediate incentives. Businesses must make profits, governments must win elections or maintain political stability, armies must win battles, charities must satisfy donors, journalists must publish articles and engineers must make machines work. Even scientists increasingly operate within institutional structures requiring grants, deliverables, measurable outcomes and demonstrations of practical impact.
The philosopher enjoys, at least in the ideal conception of the university, a peculiar freedom from these pressures. She may spend years asking a question that appears to have no immediate practical application whatsoever. This can seem indulgent until history reminds us that some of the most consequential ideas humanity has ever produced began as apparently useless abstractions.
Plato wondered what justice was. Aristotle attempted to classify the forms of human knowledge and political association. Augustine contemplated the relationship between earthly and divine authority. Hobbes imagined human beings stripped of government and asked what sort of political order rational people would construct to escape perpetual insecurity. Locke considered the origin of legitimate political authority, Kant asked what duties rational beings owe one another and Mill tried to identify the proper boundaries of individual liberty. None of these questions came equipped with a project-management timetable, yet modern political civilisation is almost impossible to imagine without them.
The very language with which we condemn the horrors of war is philosophical before it is practical. When we say that torture is wrong, civilians possess rights, aggression requires justification, prisoners must be treated humanely or governments cannot legitimately extinguish individual liberty merely because doing so is convenient, we are invoking propositions about morality, political authority and human dignity. These propositions did not emerge automatically from nature; they were argued over, refined and defended through centuries of intellectual struggle.
Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression makes this particularly apparent. The conflict is obviously about territory, military power and national survival, yet beneath these concrete realities lies a contest between radically different conceptions of political legitimacy. One conception holds that states belong, in some ultimate sense, to the people who inhabit them and that those people possess a moral claim to determine their political future. Another imagines history, civilisation, ethnicity and geopolitical power as conferring upon great states some entitlement to dominate smaller neighbours. One worldview emphasises individual agency and political consent, while the other tends towards hierarchy, historical destiny and imperial entitlement. These are philosophical disagreements, but philosophical disagreements with artillery attached.
A soldier defending a trench outside Kharkiv does not need to have read Locke to believe that Ukraine should decide its own future. Nor does a civilian sheltering from missiles need to have studied Kant to understand that deliberately terrorising civilians is morally wrong. Philosophy does not manufacture every moral intuition from nothing; rather, it examines those intuitions, discovers the principles beneath them, exposes their contradictions and constructs intellectual systems through which they can be defended against competing ideas.
That last function is particularly important because evil is rarely intellectually naked. Political violence almost always arrives carrying abstractions of its own. Empires have theories, dictatorships have philosophies and totalitarian movements manufacture elaborate accounts of history, nation, race, class, destiny and necessity. The perpetrators of political atrocities seldom announce that they are committing evil merely because they enjoy evil. They explain why circumstances supposedly require what they are doing.
Bad philosophy can therefore become extraordinarily dangerous, but the answer to bad philosophy is not the abandonment of philosophy. It is better philosophy, subjected to criticism, contradiction, evidence and the relentless testing of one set of ideas against another.
This is one reason why apparently obscure academic arguments matter. Universities preserve environments in which assumptions can be challenged without requiring immediate political usefulness. A philosopher may ask whether sovereignty is absolute, whether nations possess moral rights, whether future generations have claims upon us, whether machines can bear responsibility, whether punishment can be justified or whether there are moral limits to obedience. At the moment these questions are asked, they may seem remote from ordinary life. Then history changes and suddenly everyone needs an answer.
Artificial intelligence provides an obvious contemporary example. For decades philosophers discussed questions about consciousness, personal identity, language, intentionality and the nature of intelligence that many outsiders regarded as scholastic curiosities. Then humanity began constructing machines capable of producing sophisticated language, reasoning across immense bodies of information and interacting with people in increasingly human-like ways. Questions once confined to philosophy seminars suddenly became questions for governments, corporations and civilisation itself.
What constitutes understanding? Can intelligence exist without consciousness? What moral obligations might attach to artificial entities? Who is responsible for decisions produced jointly by humans and machines? What becomes of human autonomy when algorithms understand our preferences better than we understand them ourselves? The engineers can tell us how the machines work, but they cannot, merely by virtue of being engineers, tell us what humanity ought to do with them. That troublesome word ought is where the philosopher enters the room.
War intensifies rather than diminishes this need because wartime places societies under exceptional moral pressure. Decisions must be taken rapidly, information is incomplete, fear becomes pervasive, governments acquire extraordinary powers, hatred becomes psychologically understandable and propaganda flourishes. Distinctions between justice and revenge become dangerously easy to blur, precisely when the emotional circumstances of war make those distinctions most difficult to maintain.
Under such circumstances, abstraction becomes a form of intellectual discipline. Principles compel us to ask whether something remains wrong even when doing it would be useful to our side. They require distinctions between enemy governments and enemy populations, between military necessity and cruelty, between legitimate secrecy and unaccountable power. Philosophy creates conceptual distance from the passions of the moment, and that distance can become particularly valuable when passions are entirely understandable.
This does not mean philosophers are wiser than everybody else. History supplies ample evidence that philosophers can be vain, foolish, politically naïve and spectacularly wrong. Some have lent intellectual respectability to monstrous political systems, while others have constructed theories so detached from ordinary human experience that they seem almost intentionally incomprehensible. Yet this is an argument for intellectual pluralism, not intellectual silence.
The university is valuable precisely because no philosopher should possess a monopoly upon abstraction. One theorist constructs an elegant system; another spends a career demolishing it. Students challenge both, subsequent generations reconsider the argument and ideas once regarded as obvious become strange while ideas once regarded as absurd become commonplace. Slowly, imperfectly and without any guarantee of progress, humanity’s conceptual vocabulary becomes richer.
There is also something profoundly humane about thinking for its own sake during wartime. War tries to compress human existence into survival. It tells us that only ammunition, territory, electricity, food, intelligence and physical security matter. Obviously all these things matter enormously, but if they were all that mattered there would ultimately be very little worth defending.
People fight wars so that human beings may continue doing things other than fighting wars. They fight so that orchestras may perform, children may learn mathematics, lovers may sit in cafés, historians may argue about dead emperors, painters may cover canvases with inexplicable colours and philosophers may spend an afternoon wondering whether numbers really exist. These apparently unnecessary activities constitute much of what civilisation actually is.
There is therefore no contradiction between the soldier in the trench and the philosopher in the ivory tower. At their best, they inhabit different positions within the same civilisational structure. One protects the physical conditions under which freedom of thought can survive, while the other investigates what that freedom means and why it is valuable.
The relationship should nevertheless involve humility on both sides. Academics should resist the temptation to imagine that theoretical sophistication grants automatic authority over practical affairs. A person who has spent twenty years studying theories of war may still know considerably less about surviving one than a twenty-year-old infantryman who has spent six months at the front. Conversely, practical experience alone cannot resolve every moral or political question. Experience supplies facts and intuitions; reflection attempts to understand what they mean.
The greatest intellectual achievements often emerge when these worlds collide. Philosophy becomes richer when confronted with reality, while practical life becomes more intelligible when examined through concepts larger than immediate experience. The ivory tower is most valuable not when its doors are locked against the world, but when sufficient distance is maintained to permit reflection upon that world without becoming wholly absorbed by its immediate demands.
This is especially important for societies emerging from war. Eventually Ukraine will face questions that no artillery system can answer. What does justice require after mass violence? How should collaborators be treated? What balance should be struck between punishment and reconciliation? How should political institutions accommodate veterans, displaced people and communities transformed by occupation? What obligations does one generation owe another when reconstruction costs extend across decades? What does victory mean if the society that emerges from war has itself been morally transformed by the experience of fighting it?
These are political questions, legal questions and economic questions, but beneath all of them are philosophical questions. Political institutions can provide procedures, courts can apply laws and economists can calculate costs, yet somebody must still confront the principles by which the procedures, laws and costs ought to be judged.
Perhaps the deepest contribution of philosophy is that it refuses to accept that the world must remain intellectually imprisoned by the circumstances of the present. The philosopher asks not merely what exists but what might exist, not merely what people believe but whether their beliefs are justified and not merely how institutions operate but upon what principles they ought to rest.
War, by contrast, is relentlessly concerned with what is. There is an army there. A missile is coming. A building has collapsed. A person is dead. These realities cannot be wished away by abstraction, and any philosophy that pretends otherwise deserves contempt. Yet civilisation survives by retaining the capacity to ask what ought to be, because without that question survival itself becomes an end without a purpose.
That capacity requires imagination, distance and sometimes abstraction of an almost absurd degree. It requires people willing to disappear into libraries and argue about concepts whose consequences they may never live to see. Some of those arguments will prove sterile, others will be forgotten and a few may eventually alter the vocabulary through which millions of people understand themselves.
There is an especially striking way of understanding this from Lviv. On a winter night an air-raid siren may begin its mechanical lament across the city, telephones illuminating with warnings as people decide whether this particular alarm requires a journey downstairs. Somewhere to the east, air-defence crews are watching screens, pilots may be in the air and exhausted soldiers are occupying positions in darkness. The concerns of the night are concrete, immediate and unforgiving.
At approximately the same moment, several thousand kilometres away, a light may still be burning behind a medieval window in Cambridge. A graduate student may be sitting beneath shelves of books wondering whether moral obligations can exist independently of human preferences, whether consciousness is reducible to computation or whether a political community can possess rights independently of the individuals who compose it. The radiator probably works, the college court is quiet and the most serious interruption to the evening may be the approaching closing time of the library.
The contrast can seem almost obscene. One person listens for explosions while another worries about a footnote; one checks an air-raid application while another checks a passage in Kant. Yet it would be a terrible mistake to conclude that the second world is therefore parasitic upon the first. The existence of places in which people remain free to think about apparently useless things is one of the things the first world is struggling to preserve.
Cambridge itself knows something of this paradox. Its ancient courts appear designed to suggest that history happens elsewhere, yet generations of people who passed through them subsequently found themselves confronted by revolutions, wars, scientific transformations and political catastrophes. Ideas cultivated in tranquility do not necessarily remain tranquil once released into the world. The library and the battlefield are not opposites so much as distant rooms in the same complicated house of civilisation.
Nor should Cambridge be romanticised. An old college can produce foolishness as efficiently as any modern office block, and centuries of tradition are no guarantee of wisdom. The point is not that philosophers sitting beneath Gothic arches possess some mystical insight unavailable to people elsewhere. It is that a society sufficiently confident to permit some of its cleverest people to spend their lives pursuing questions without obvious utility has created an intellectual reserve whose value cannot be measured by quarterly results.
Lviv understands the other half of the bargain. Its cafés remain crowded, books continue to be published, concerts are performed, university lectures continue and arguments about politics, history and culture proceed with characteristic enthusiasm, even though reminders of the war are never very distant. This is not frivolity in defiance of tragedy. It is an assertion that tragedy will not be permitted to define the entire range of human existence.
The same principle connects the old university town and the wartime city. Civilisation requires people prepared to defend the possibility of ordinary and extraordinary thought, and it requires other people prepared to use that possibility. The soldier guarding a position in eastern Ukraine and the philosopher reading alone in Cambridge may never meet, and each might find the other’s daily existence incomprehensible. Nevertheless they participate, however indirectly, in the same enterprise: preserving a world in which human beings are permitted to be more than creatures struggling for immediate survival.
So we should preserve the ivory towers, even while missiles fall elsewhere. We should criticise them when they become complacent, puncture their pretensions when they become ridiculous and insist that their inhabitants occasionally look through the windows at the world outside. But we should not demolish them, because a civilisation that abandons abstract thought in favour of permanent practicality risks forgetting why its practical struggles matter in the first place.
Amidst the terrible practicality of war, humanity still needs places devoted to the impractical. We need people who ask questions for which there is no immediate operational answer, because abstractions allow us to imagine principles beyond necessity, futures beyond survival and forms of human existence beyond violence. The distance between an air-raid shelter in Lviv and an ancient library in Cambridge may seem immense, but intellectually it is much smaller than it appears.
Late at night, the siren in Lviv eventually stops. People emerge, cafés reopen in the morning, trams begin moving and another day of wartime normality starts. Far away in Cambridge, somebody extinguishes a reading lamp, closes a book and walks across a silent court having perhaps solved nothing whatsoever.
That apparent uselessness is part of the point. A civilisation worth defending must contain things whose value cannot be explained by their immediate utility, because otherwise civilisation becomes indistinguishable from an exceptionally efficient survival mechanism. Somewhere there must remain music that serves no purpose, scholarship without a commercial application, arguments that cannot be settled and questions that may never receive answers.
The soldier may defend civilisation with a rifle, the engineer with concrete and electricity and the doctor with medicine. The philosopher defends something less visible but no less essential: humanity’s stubborn determination to understand what civilisation is for. So while an air-raid siren sounds over Lviv, we should hope that somewhere in Cambridge an entirely impractical philosopher is still awake beneath an old stone tower, arguing with Plato under the light of a desk lamp.
We should hope, in other words, that the light stays on.
