Peace Talks—Who Will Listen? By Fred Dallmayr. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 288p. $40.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

In this book, Fred Dallmayr tries to discover what intellectual resources are available for peacemaking today, in a world that he believes to be fundamentally violent. To do so, he scans the world's philosophic and religious traditions to find their arguments on behalf of peace. He takes as his starting point Erasmus, whose The Complaint of Peace of 1517 begins with a personification of Peace: Querela pacis, “Peace talks.” Dallmayr's book starts with an analysis of what Erasmus said about how to make peace, then goes on to survey other such arguments and practices in the world's philosophical and spiritual traditions. The work is remarkably wide-ranging, as it examines in some depth figures as varied as Aristotle, Confucius, Grotius, Kant, Gandhi, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martha Nussbaum.