ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the conceptions of world peace throughout the history of Western civilization from the ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment and show how Kant's philosophy in particular influenced peace plans of the twentieth century. The twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that Western civilization began in ancient Greece since its philosophical doctrines and everyday routines began there. Rene Descartes (1596–1650) is commonly considered the father of the Enlightenment (which is typically considered to run from the late 1600s to the early 1800s) in that he shifted the locus of the criterion of truth from God or the priest to oneself. By the late eighteenth century, projects for "perpetual peace" became more commonplace among Enlightenment philosophers. For Kant, moral personhood is not limited to the individual; rather, a collective body such as a state or country should be regarded as a moral person as well.
