Conscientious objection to participating in induced abortion is not present in the Finnish health care system or legislation unlike in many other European countries.

The realities of human agency and decision making pose serious challenges for research ethics. This article explores six major challenges that require more attention in the ethics education of students and scientists and in the research on ethical conduct in science. The first of them is the routinization of action, which makes the detection of ethical issues difficult. The social governance of action creates ethical problems related to power. The heuristic nature of human decision making implies the risk of ethical (...) bias. The moral disengagement mechanisms represent a human tendency to evade personal responsibility. The greatest challenge of all might be the situational variation in people’s ethical behaviour. Even minor situational factors have a surprisingly strong influence on our actions. Furthermore, finally, the nature of ethics itself also causes problems: instead of clear answers, we receive a multitude of theories and intuitions that may sometimes be contradictory. All these features of action and ethics represent significant risks for ethical conduct in science. I claim that they have to be managed within the everyday practices of science and addressed explicitly in research ethics education. I analyse them and suggest some ways in which their risks can be alleviated. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism states that evolution cannot produce warranted beliefs. In contrast, according to Plantinga, Christian theism provides properly functioning cognitive faculties in an appropriate cognitive environment, in accordance with a design plan aimed at producing true beliefs. But does theism fulfill criteria I–III? Judging from the Bible, God employs deceit in his relations with humanity, rendering our cognitive functions unreliable. Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that God's purpose would be to produce true beliefs in (...) humans. Finally, from the theistic/religious perspective, it is impossible to tell whether observations have natural or supernatural causes, which undermines an appropriate cognitive environment. Reliable identification of deceit or miracles could alleviate these problems, but the theistic community has failed to resolve this issue. Dismissal of parts of the Bible, or attempts to find alternative interpretations, would collapse into skepticism or deism. Thus, Plantinga's problem of epistemic warrant backfires on theism. (shrink)

This book provides the first comprehensive and critical examination of Mäki's realist philosophy of economics.

This article examines the belief among the cultural elites that ‘people’ should be protected from dangerous knowledge, ‘dangerous’ in the sense that there are factual statements which may have negative moral and political consequences to society. Such a belief in the negative consequences of dangerous – that is, politically suspicious – knowledge represents an intellectual tradition that goes back to Plato and his famous state‐utopian work Republic. This article analyses moral interpretations of statements regarding matters of fact (so‐called moral reading), (...) and draws conclusions about the reasons why knowledge can be considered dangerous to ‘the people’ or to some specific groups in the population, such as children, mothers, students, the sick and dying and the working class. The so‐called sociobiology debate, a controversy that started with the publication of the zoologist E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology in 1975, is discussed in this article as a ‘case study’ of dangerous knowledge. (shrink)

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Scandinavian Symposium and Workshops on Algorithm Theory, SWAT 2012, held in Helsinki, Finland, in July 2012, co-located with the 23rd Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM 2012. The 34 papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 127 submissions. The papers present original research and cover a wide range of topics in the field of design and analysis of algorithms and data structures.

This paper focuses on a topical issue - the idea of ‘justice in education’ – developed by Krassimir Stojanov, among other recent educational justice theorists. Justice in education has to ask ‘educational questions about education’, which means that educational justice theory should be capable of dealing with educational practices, and constellations that are asymmetrical interaction orders. This requires, from the perspective of a child, criteria to distinguish between justified and unjustified educative demands towards responsibility and autonomy. This paper analyses forms (...) of recognition as a legitimate summons that enables the individual’s autonomy. It also analyses the illegitimate demands that emerge from Stojanov’s innovative idea to combine the forms of misrecognition with the concepts of epistemic injustice. The second chapter of this paper introduces the challenges related to the recognitive justice as justice in education. The examination of Dietrich Benner’s recent critique of recognition theory illuminates these challenges in two ways: first, it is shown that there can be something negatively experienced, but the result of productive disruptions that the educator need to produce, which are out of the scope of recognition theory. Second, the recognitive justice paradigm ignores elementary pedagogical conditions and requirements, ‘the pedagogical knowledge’ and its methods, and is therefore unable to fully grasp the legitimate educational authority. This paper concludes with a synthesis that finds the crucial elements from the recognition theory to justice in education and critically assessing Benner’s claims. Overall, the paper offers potential for further development in justice in education. (shrink)

A study of Modernist utopias of the mind. This book examines the psychodynamic writings of Otto Gross, C G Jung, Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm. It argues, utopianism became increasingly important to the fundamental ambitions of all four thinkers, and places the 'utopian impulse' with the historical context of the early twentieth century.

A study of Modernist utopias of the mind. This book examines the psychodynamic writings of Otto Gross, C G Jung, Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm. It argues, utopianism became increasingly important to the fundamental ambitions of all four thinkers, and places the 'utopian impulse' with the historical context of the early twentieth century.

ABSTRACT Right after the Finnish Civil War of 1918, the first treatises discussing the insurgents in crowd psychological terms were published. Between 1918 and the early 1920s, several Finnish authors used Gustave Le Bon's and other crowd psychologists’ ideas of suggestion, mental epidemics, and the dangers of socialism in their interpretations of the aborted revolution. The article argues that the use of crowd psychology in the years following the Finnish Civil War was an attempt to articulate in objective, scientific language (...) an emotional and moral reaction to the shock of seeing a nation violently divided and tearing itself apart. Intrinsic to Finnish interpretations of crowd psychology were the increasing antagonism between socialists and anti-socialists, the influence of Bolshevism on the worker's movement, the importance attributed to the ‘racial’ qualities of the people, and the impact of the Civil War on the educated classes – all issues that are easy to relate to wider European and global contexts. This article lends support to the thesis that crowd psychology was an influential intellectual construction that had great heuristic value among contemporaries from the late nineteenth century to World War II. (shrink)

This article has a twofold aim. First it is shown, based on Joseph Christopher Greer’s earlier analysis, that there is a close historical, and to some extent substantial, affinity between deep ecology and esotericism. Greer’s findings will be corroborated by applying three different definitions of esotericism to the question at hand. Second, based on Sean McGrath’s ecophilosophy, it will be argued that utilizing esoteric influences systematically in deep ecological context can help deep ecology to avoid some problematic aspects it is (...) often accused of. Especially the esoteric conception of living nature can help deep ecology to bridge the gulf between nature and the human being, and thereby to avoid both theoretical and practical anti-humanism. (shrink)

F.W.J. Schelling argues in his middle period work Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom that will should be understood as the most fundamental constitutive element of reality. Though it is often downplayed in recent scholarship, Schelling derived his most central ideas for this work more or less directly from the theosophy of Jacob Boehme. I will argue that far from peripheral and antiquated curiosity, Schelling´s esoteric influences constitute the very foundation of his middle period thought. Schelling´s affinity to (...) esotericism enabled him to develop a form of pantheism, which is not tied to the familiar problematic aspects of traditional Christian and post-Christian narratives. In mainstream Christianity, the meaning of life is dependent on the almighty God´s will, for which nature is inherently meaningless material. For Schelling, by contrast, nature itself is constitutively willing and meaningful. Consequently, owing to his esoteric influences, Schelling provides an account of the meaning of life which diverges from the dominant idea of Western philosophical and theological tradition that the meaning of life consists in a ”true world” or ”destination” beyond immanent reality. (shrink)

This volume contains the workshop papers of the philosophical conference Dimensions of Personhood held in August 13-15, 2004 at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The conference was organized by the Finnish Academy research project The Concept of Person. In the call for papers, the theme of the conference was formulated as follows. Recent developments in neuroscience and information technology, in medicine and biotechnology, and in society and culture more broadly have made various questions concerning our identity as human beings urgent. As (...) our power over ourselves increases, the questions of who we are, how we are to conceive of ourselves and how we should use our powers over ourselves, become more and more pressing. The concept of person is in many ways a necessary starting point in answering such questions. However, the concept is often used in an indeterminate sense, and when efforts have been made to clarify the concept, different philosophers have ended up with rival usages and rival theories. For example, the theories differ on whether ‘person’ is identical with ‘human being’, ‘subject’ or ‘self ’. Yet it seems to us that the rival theories of personhood are trying to capture a common idea, namely that persons differ from (other) animals, machines, detached ‘minds’, brains and sub-personal mechanisms in the kind of relations to self, to others and to the world that they have, or are capable of having. The general idea of the conference is thus to approach personhood along three dimensions, where the being of persons differs from the being of non-persons: 1 self-relations, 2. interpersonal relations, and 3. world-relations. The guiding question of the conference is: how does the concept of person illuminate these relations (to self, to others, to the world), and how do these relations illuminate the concept of person? Our wish is to bring together recent work done in each of these dimensions and further our understanding concerning the ways in which personhood and these relations are intertwined. (shrink)