The idea of a higher level phenomenon having a downward causal influence on a lower level process or entity has taken a variety of forms. In order to discuss the relation between emergence and downward causation, the specific variety of the thesis of downward causation (DC) must be identified. Based on some ontological theses about inter-level relations, types of causation and the possibility of reduction, three versions of DC are distinguished. Of these, the `Strong' form of DC is held to (...) be in conflict with contemporary science; the `Medium' version of DC may for instance describe thoughts constraining neurophysiological states, while the `Weak' form of DC is physically acceptable but may not in practice be a feasible description of the mind/brain or the cell/molecule relation. All forms have their specific problems, but the Medium and the Weak version seems to be most promising. (shrink)

University of Copenhagen University of Copenhagen University of Copenhagen Blegdamsvej 17 Njalsgade 80 Njalsgade 80 DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø DK 2300 Copenhagen S DK-2300 Copenhagen S Denmark.

Emotions are the focus of intense debate both in contemporary philosophy and psychology, and increasingly also in the history of ideas. Simo Knuuttila presents a comprehensive survey of philosophical theories of emotion from Plato to Renaissance times, combining rigorous philosophical analysis with careful historical reconstruction. The first part of the book covers the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle and later ancient views from Stoicism to Neoplatonism and, in addition, their reception and transformation by early Christian thinkers from Clement and (...) Origen to Augustine and Cassian. Knuuttila then proceeds to a discussion of ancient themes in medieval thought, and of new medieval conceptions, codified in the so-called faculty psychology from Avicenna to Aquinas, in thirteenth century taxonomies, and in the voluntarist approach of Duns Scotus, William Ockham, and their followers. Philosophers, classicists, historians of philosophy, historians of psychology, and anyone interested in emotion will find much to stimulate them in this fascinating book. (shrink)

The philosopher and ordained rabbi Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) is one of the most important figures on the 20th century German intellectual scene and beyond. As one of the first academic jet-setters, he had been the holder of the founding chair for Jewish Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and was professor at Columbia University. Taubes combined traditional Jewish thinking with contemporary issues in philosophy such as theories of secularization, the relation between politics and religion, and the hermeneutics of time, more specifically (...) messianism, apocalyptic thinking, and gnosticism. (shrink)

Speaking Being: Werner Erhard, Martin Heidegger, and a New Possibility for Being Human provides an unprecedented study of the ideas and methodology originally developed by the thinker Werner Erhard, and presented in a course called The Forum, a course that has since evolved further and is offered today by Landmark Worldwide. The book is a comparative analysis that demonstrates how Erhard's rhetorical project and the philosophical project of Martin Heidegger each illuminate the other. The central claim of the authors is (...) that the dialogue of The Forum--presented here in the form of a transcript of an actual course that took place in San Francisco in December of 1989--functions to generate a language which speaks Being, that is, The Forum is an instance of what is called ontological rhetoric: a technology of communicating the unspoken realm of language that allows its listeners to create a new possibility for being human in the world. The purpose of this book is to show that this is actually accomplished in The Forum, and to demonstrate--with Heidegger's thinking presented in a series of "Sidebars" and "Intervals" alongside The Forum transcript --how Erhard did it in 1989. Through placing Erhard's language use alongside Heidegger's, the authors not only have illuminated the work of both thinkers; they also have made this extraordinary form of rhetorical pedagogy available for interdisciplinary study. (shrink)

The study of the cultural Cold War and East–West interaction outside diplomacy and high politics has emerged as an important research field during the last two decades. With a few exceptions, however, scholarly interaction has been overshadowed by other forms of interaction. Existing research has mostly paid attention to technological exchange and to espionage, which was at times connected with scientific exchanges across the Iron Curtain. This article discusses scholarly exchanges in the human sciences between Finland and the Soviet Union. (...) Even though Finland was a western-style democracy with a market economy, it had close political ties with the Soviet Union, which allowed for the development of active scholarly connections between the countries. This article discusses the emergence of such connections in the human sciences and the reasons for their rapid expansion in the 1970s. (shrink)

Taking the regime established by the Convention on Biological Diversity as a foundation, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, it examines how the international biodiversity regime integrates the private property paradigm into its toolbox for conservation and sustainability and then critically evaluates the shortcomings of the intellectual property mechanism. Second, it argues that the increasing ubiquity of open access emerging technologies should lead the international community to carefully assess the benefits for conservation research of reverting to a framework (...) that places biodiversity within the global commons. The impasse between global commons advocates and the intellectual property status quo obscures the underlying problematic of the “commodity fiction” of biodiversity and increasing use of digital sequence information likely exacerbates power asymmetries. One remedy explored here is an alternative to these two approaches that dislodges rather than discards the concept of private property. Drawing inspiration from Polanyi and building on May (2010), the article shows how a hybrid approach bridging a public and private conception of genetic resources and traditional knowledge could more effectively and equitably distribute benefits to countries and communities providing resources of value to industry. (shrink)

This book not only articulates a tradition-specific Pentecostal rationality of Biblical Pragmatism, but also provides the first intellectual history of a major British classical Pentecostal denomination. Pentecostal theologians increasingly acknowledge that their theological methodology should be informed by a Pentecostal rationality, epistemology and theological hermeneutics. Simo Frestadius offers such a Pentecostal rationality from a Foursquare perspective. Frestadius first analyses and evaluates some of the main contemporary Pentecostal rationalities and epistemologies to date, with a particular emphasis on the works of (...) Amos Yong and James K.A. Smith and L. William Oliverio Jr., before proposing that Alasdair MacIntyre's tradition-focused and historically-minded narrative approach is conducive in providing a more tradition-constituted Pentecostal rationality. Utilising the methodological insights of MacIntyre, the book then provides a philosophically informed historical narrative of a major British Pentecostal tradition, namely, the Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance, by exploring its underlying context and roots as a classical Pentecostal movement, its emergence as a religious tradition, and its two major 'epistemological crises'. Based on this historical narration and analysis, it is argued that Elim's tacit Pentecostal rationality is best defined as Pentecostal Biblical Pragmatism in a Foursquare Gospel framework. This form of rationality is then developed vis-à-vis Elim's Pentecostal concept of truth, biblical hermeneutics, and pragmatic epistemic justification in dialogue with William P. Alston. In doing the above, the book not only articulates a tradition-specific Pentecostal rationality of Biblical Pragmatism but also provides the first intellectual history of a major British classical Pentecostal denomination. (shrink)

The article defends the no-harm principle as an intuitively plausible and a common-sense way to justify individual emitters’ duties to take more radical steps in the fight against climate change. The appearance of climate change as requiring large-scale collective action should not lead us astray with respect to the fundamental moral nature of the problem: individual emitters who knowingly sustain and foster the carbon intensive ways of acting also bear personal moral responsibility for the foreseeable climate-related harm and acquire in (...) line with the no-harm principle a direct personal duty to contribute to the efforts of preventing the harm. The article examines more closely the so-called collectivistic approach, according to which emitters’ responsibilities are primarily collective, and argues that without individualistic grounds of emitters’ personal moral responsibility for the harm the collectivistic approach fails to provide unstructured emitters with sufficient reason to act together and fulfil their correlative duty of effective harm prevention. The article argues that since an emitter's personal moral responsibility warrants others to expect her personal engagement in the efforts of effective harm prevention and can justify blame if she fails, identifications of personal responsibility may also significantly increase unstructured emitters’ collective capability of remedying the climate crisis. (shrink)

This article provides the first historiographical analysis of the origins of Jewish Orthodoxy in Helsinki and describes the development of the rabbinate from the establishment of the congregation in the late 1850s up to the early 1980s. The origins of the Finnish Jewish community lies in the nineteenth-century Russian army. The majority of Jewish soldiers in Helsinki originated from the realm of Lithuanian Jewish culture, that is, mainly non-Hasidic Jewish Orthodoxy that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Initially, the Finnish (...) Jewish religious establishment continued this Orthodox-Litvak tradition. After the independence of Finland, the Helsinki congregation hired academic, Modern Orthodox rabbis educated in Western Europe. Following the devastation of the Shoah and the Second World War, the recruitment of rabbis faced new challenges. Overall, the rabbi recruitments were in congruence with the social and cultural development of the Helsinki community, yet respected its Orthodox roots. (shrink)

Activities protesting against major polluters who cause climate change may cause damage to private property in the process. This paper investigates the case for a more international general basis of moral justification for such protests. Specific reference is made to the Kingsnorth case, which involved a protest by Greenpeace against coal-powered electricity generation in the UK. An appeal is made to Rawlsian fairness arguments, traditionally employed to support the obligation of citizens to their national governments as opposed to their international (...) duties. The argument made here, however, is that there seem to be sufficient reasons for holding that a stable climate is one of the first truly global public goods that is indispensable to acceptable standards of living everywhere. This would suffice to justify international and intergenerational 'atmospheric' political obligations, which in turn may justify protests - even those causing some damage to private property - against the laws and policies that violate the fair terms of cooperation in providing a stable climate. The fairness argument aims also to provide a ground from which Green political theory could integrate accounts of radical forms of citizenship into appeals to state political authority. This leads to justifying acts of civil disobedience on the basis of novel understandings of 'atmospheric' citizenship obligations. (shrink)

Originally published March 20, 2020. This version published December 30, 2020.

This article analyses a New Year’s revue from 1929 by Helsinki-born Jac Weinstein and the image of the Jewish merchant. Many stereotypes concerning ethnicity and gender are at play in the revue and the line between humour, Jewish self-deprecation and antisemitic depiction of the Jew becomes blurred. The questionable business ethics of Jewish merchants is one of the core themes of the revue.The article asks what role ethnic stereotypes played in Jewish humour before the height of National Socialist racial antisemitism, (...) and what purpose such performances served. It examines the various stereotypes found in the couplets, sketches and one-act plays in Weinstein’s kleynkunst performance against the background of transnational Jewish performing arts and current research on Jewish entrepreneurship and antisemitism in Finland. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest pokazanie możliwości zastosowania J.M. Bocheńskiego koncepcji zabobonu filozoficznego (pogląd fałszywy stwarzający pozory prawdziwości) w analizie etycznych ocen i argumentacji. Dla osiągnięcia tego celu koncepcja Bocheńskiego jest najpierw omówiona, następnie wskazane są cechy myślenia etycznego sprzyjające jego podatności na zabobony filozoficzne oraz podjęty jest problem możliwości rozpoznawania i ograniczania zabobonów w refleksji nad moralnością.

1. Complex demonstratives (noun phrases of the form ‘that F’) often behave in devious ways which do not fit well with their traditional understanding as devices of direct reference. Namely, there a...

In 1877 Louis Paul Cailletet in France and Raoul Pictet in Switzerland liquefied oxygen in the form of a mist. The liquefaction of the first of the so-called permanent gases heralded the birth of low-temperature research and is often described in the literature as having started a ‘race’ for attaining progressively lower temperatures. In fact, between 1877 and 1908, when helium, the last of the permanent gases, was liquefied, there were many priority disputes—something quite characteristic of the emergence of a (...) new research field. This paper examines Cailletet’s path to the liquefaction of oxygen, as well as a debate between him and the Polish physicist Zygmunt Wróblewski over the latter’s contribution to the liquefaction of gases. (shrink)

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar la visión popperiana de la discusión crítica que, en última instancia, es responsable por la creación de conjeturas osadas, tanto en el campo epistemológico, como en el campo político y social. Presentaremos el presupuesto falibilista de nuestras aleg..

My purpose is to analyze the peculiar thinking of Weil, according to the categories of reasoning, as a choice to avoid violence. In his definition of man, Weil recovers the notion of realization, with which man is redefined in terms of what he must be and not merely for what he is. There-to, man is ..

This paper discusses the issues of deciding to have a child with mental retardation, and of terminating a pregnancy when the future child is known to have the same disability. I discuss these problems by criticizing a utilitarian argument, namely, that one should act in a way that results in less suffering and less limited opportunity in the world. My argument is that future parents ought to assume a strong responsibility towards the well-being of their prospective children when they decide (...) to reproduce. The moral point in cases in which our acts affect the well-being of future children should be expressed strictly in terms of parents' culpability. Future children thus do not have current moral standing but presently living persons have current obligations to consider the presumable effects of their actions on future people. I will also argue that there are morally significant differences between 'selective contraception' and selective abortion. (shrink)

This paper discusses whether prospectiveparents ought to find out about their geneticconstitution for reproductive reasons. It isargued that ignoring genetic information can bein line with responsible parenthood or perhapseven recommendable. This is because parenthoodis essentially an unconditional project inwhich parents ought to commit themselves tonurturing any kind of child. Besides, thetraditional reasons offered for theunfortunateness of impairments and the tragicfate of families with disabled children are notconvincing. Other morally problematic outcomesof genetics, such as discrimination againstindividuals with impairments, and limiting freeparental (...) decision making, are alsoconsidered. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie i analiza poglądów F.A. von Hayeka na temat moralności (zebranych z różnych jego dzieł) oraz wskazanie na ich znaczenie dla współczesnych dyskusji w filozofii politycznej, jak również w etyce. Warto podjąć ten temat z uwagi na potrzebę opracowania myśli aksjologicznej Hayeka, wybitnego myśliciela o poglądach mocno skrystalizowanych, spójnych i oryginalnych. Jego refleksje mają potencjał, aby wiele wnieść w debaty na temat wartości, są one jednak mało znane lub niesłusznie pomijane. W pierwszej części rozważań wyjaśniam, w jaki (...) sposób według Hayeka moralność wspiera wolność indywidualną, a więc wartość centralną w jego aksjologii: społeczeństwo jest wyposażone w moralność (obok prawa stanowionego) w celu zachowania porządku przy minimum stosowania przymusu (istota ładu wolnościowego). Rozdział drugi poświęcam omówieniu wyróżnionych przez Hayeka rodzajów moralności, wskazuję, w jaki sposób, wzajemnie się uzupełniając, konstytuują one tradycję moralną. Chodzi o zespoły zasad fundujących z jednej strony ład naturalny (jego normy odpowiadają instynktownym postawom słusznie dochodzącym do głosu w małych wspólnotach), z drugiej strony – tzw. ład rozszerzony (związane z nim normy nie są zgodne z instynktami, regulują współistnienie obcych sobie ludzi wchodzących w anonimowe relacje w obrębie dużych społeczności ludzkich). W rozdziale trzecim przedstawiam Hayeka poglądy w kwestii możliwości uzasadnienia norm tradycyjnej moralności. Chodzi zwłaszcza o rozwinięcie poglądu, że uznawanie zasad moralności jest kluczowe dla społeczeństwa wolnościowego, i to niezależnie od tego, czy mamy dla nich zadowalające racjonalne uzasadnienie. W końcowej części rozważań zasygnalizowane jest znaczenie Hayeka koncepcji moralności w zakresie nurtów myśli politycznej, z którymi Hayek jest wiązany (indywidualizm, liberalizm, konserwatyzm), jak również dla metaetyki (próba odtworzenia zasad konstytutywnych dla cywilizacji; głos w dyskusji między perspektywą bezstronną i stronniczą w etyce). (shrink)

Current ecological threats, such as the sixth mass extinction or climate change, highlight the need to evaluate the moral implications of changing populations, both human and non-human. The paper sketches a non-anthropocentric and multispecies sufficientarian account of population ethics. After discussing several other options for multispecies population ethics, the paper proposes a two-level account of multispecies sufficientarianism, according to which the value of populations depend on two kinds of sufficientarian thresholds. First, there is a species-relativized individual-level threshold for what species-specific (...) flourishing is for an organism. Second, there is a population-level threshold for a sufficiently viable population enough to support the species-specific flourishing of the current and future members of that population. The paper concludes by discussing some of the practical implications and concerns raised by the two-level account suggested. (shrink)

Current ecological threats, such as the sixth mass extinction or climate change, highlight the need to evaluate the moral implications of changing populations, both human and non-human. The paper sketches a non-anthropocentric and multispecies sufficientarian account of population ethics. After discussing several other options for multispecies population ethics, the paper proposes a two-level account of multispecies sufficientarianism, according to which the value of populations depend on two kinds of sufficientarian thresholds. First, there is a species-relativized individual-level threshold for what species-specific (...) flourishing is for an organism. Second, there is a population-level threshold for a sufficiently viable population enough to support the species-specific flourishing of the current and future members of that population. The paper concludes by discussing some of the practical implications and concerns raised by the two-level account suggested. (shrink)

In this review I provide a brief analysis of the main features of the collective volume Shifting Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2020), edited by Teresa Marques and Åsa Wikforss. The volume addresses several related topics, and it contains contributions from psychologists and philosophers. It deals with the topic of concept variation understood in a broad sense, for it tackles diachronic, contextual, interpersonal and even intrapersonal variation; besides, the second part of the book is devoted to the topic of concept revision (...) and amelioration. I provide a brief description of the book and then I critically assess each of the contributions. (shrink)