World War II

The largest conflict in human history. Roughly six years of fighting across Europe, North Africa, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia, with consequences that extend forward into nearly every political and intellectual question of the last eighty years.

I keep World War II as an Event because it functions as one in conversation. People reference it, allude to it, learn from it, argue about it. To sort the references properly I need a typed node for the war itself, distinct from the participating nations, the specific battles, the leaders, the survivors, the books written afterwards.

The note is sparse on detail because the work of populating it is the work of half a vault, and I do not need that. I need a node to point at when something refers back to it. The schema honors the gap. An Event with no participants and no place is still an Event, when the participants and the place are everywhere.

The post-war philosophical climate is part of the chain that gives The Analytic Revival of Philosophy of Religion its peculiar shape. Late-twentieth-century English-language philosophy of religion does not look the way it does without this Event upstream of it. The connection is not always made explicitly in the literature. Holding this note in the same vault as the analytic-revival note is one way I make it for myself.