Heikki Patomäki is Professor of World Politics (Global Political Economy) at the University of Helsinki.1 In Part 1 of this interview (Patomäki and Morgan 2023) he discussed his work and career up...

In Part 1 of this wide-ranging interview Heikki Patomäki discusses his early work and career up to the Global Financial Crisis. He provides comment on his role as a public intellectual and activist, his diverse academic interests and influences, and the many and varied ways he has contributed to critical realism and critical realism has influenced his work. In Part 2 he discusses his later work, the predicament of humanity and the role of futures studies.

In this article a wide range of candidates for features that are defining of personhood are conceived of as interrelated, yet irreducible, layers and dimensions of what it is to be a person in the full-fledged sense of the word. Three layers of personhood -- consisting of person-making psychological capacities, person-making interpersonal significances, and person-making institutional or deontic powers -- are distinguished. Running through the layers there are then two dimensions -- the deontic and the axiological -- corresponding to the (...) recognitive attitudes of respect and love. These recognitive attitudes of 'taking something/-one as a person' are responses to the psychological layer and directly constitutive of the interpersonal layer of the respective dimensions of personhood. The multiplicity of ways to understand what 'personhood' means is only apparently chaotic and reveals, on a closer look, a well-ordered and dynamic internal structure. (shrink)

This open access volume provides an in-depth analysis of philosophical discussions concerning the common good and its relation to self-interest in the history of Western philosophy. The thirteen chapters explore both renowned and lesser-known thinkers from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, covering also the relevant ancient background. By bridging the gap between the medieval and early modern periods, they provide fresh insights into how moral and political philosophers understood the concepts of the common good and self-interest, along with (...) their ethical and political implications. The concept of the common good occupies a central role in philosophical reflections on the public and private dimensions of moral and social life in contemporary debates. By exploring the rich and diverse ways in which the relationship between the common good and self-interest has been understood, this volume has the potential to contribute to our ongoing efforts to critically discern the possibilities and limitations of these concepts in the present. Thus, the volume will be useful for scholars interested in the multi-layered role of the notion of the common good both in the history of philosophy and in contemporary moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

Research on nursing ideology and the ethics of child and adolescent psychiatric nursing care is limited. The aim of this study was to describe and explore the ideological approaches guiding psychiatric nursing in child and adolescent psychiatric inpatient wards in Finland, and discuss the ethical, theoretical and practical concerns related to nursing ideologies. Data were collected by means of a national questionnaire survey, which included one open-ended question seeking managers' opinions on the nursing ideology used in their area of practice. (...) Questionnaires were sent to all child and adolescent psychiatric inpatient wards (n = 69) in Finland; 61 ward mangers responded. Data were analysed by qualitative and quantitative content analysis. Six categories - family centred care, individual care, milieu centred care, integrated care, educational care and psychodynamic care - were formed to specify ideological approaches used in inpatient nursing. The majority of the wards were guided by two or more approaches. Nursing models, theories and codes of ethics were almost totally ignored in the ward managers' ideological descriptions. (shrink)

A substantial article length introduction to a collection on social ontology and mutual recognition.

A substantial article-length introduction to the theme of personhood.

What is recognition and why is it so important? This book develops a synoptic conception of the significance of recognition in its many forms for human persons by means of a rational reconstruction and internal critique of classical and contemporary accounts. The book begins with a clarification of several fundamental questions concerning recognition. It then reconstructs the core ideas of Fichte, Hegel, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth and utilizes the insights and conceptual tools developed across these chapters for (...) developing a case for the universal importance of recognition for humans. It argues in favour of a universalist anthropological position, unusual in the literature on recognition, that aims to construe a philosophically sound basis for a discourse of common humanity, or of a shared human life-form for which moral relations of recognition are essential. This synthetic conception of the importance of recognition provides tools for articulating deep intuitions shared across cultures about what makes human life and forms of human co-existence better or worse, and thus tools for mutual understanding about the deepest shared concerns of humanity, or of what makes us all human persons despite our differences. -/- Recognition and the Human Life-Form will appeal to readers interested in philosophical anthropology, social and political philosophy, critical theory, and the history of philosophy. It also provides ideas and conceptual tools for fields such as anthropology, education, disability studies, international relations, law, politics, religious studies, sociology, and social research. (shrink)

In this article I discuss Wittgenstein's view of what is involved in understanding other cultures. I show that he is not committed to cultural relativism, as some of his critics argue. As he sees it, the real differences between cultures do not involve any fundamental conceptual, epistemic or other barriers that would make it impossible for us to understand and criticise other cultures. Shared forms of life and man's natural history provide a foothold for us when we attempt to understand (...) other cultures. (shrink)

The presence of various mechanisms of non-genetic inheritance is one of the main problems for current evolutionary theory according to several critics. Sufficient empirical and conceptual reasons exist to take this claim seriously, but there is little consensus on the implications of multiple inheritance systems for evolutionary processes. Here we use the Price Equation as a starting point for a discussion of the differences between four recently proposed categories of inheritance systems; genetic, epigenetic, behavioral and symbolic. Specifically, we address how (...) the components of the Price Equation encompass different non-genetic systems of inheritance in an attempt to clarify how the different systems are conceptually related. We conclude that the four classes of inheritance systems do not form distinct clusters with respect to their effect on the rate and direction of phenotypic change from one generation to the next in the absence or presence of selection. Instead, our analyses suggest that different inheritance systems can share features that are conceptually very similar, but that their implications for adaptive evolution nevertheless differ substantially as a result of differences in their ability to couple selection and inheritance. (shrink)

Why is recognition of such an importance for humans? Why should lack of recognition motivate people to fight or work for recognition? In this article, I first discuss shortly Axel Honneth's psychologizing strategy for answering these questions, and suggest that the psychological harms of lack of recognition pointed out by Honneth are neither sufficient nor necessary for motivation to fight or work for recognition to arise. According to the alternative that I then spell out, recognition and lack of it are (...) so intimately intertwined with some of the most fundamental and intuitively appealing facts about what it is to be a person in a full-fledged sense — arguably in any culture — that there are reasons to be optimistic about a more or less universal existence of latent motivation to fight or work for more or more equal recognition. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that Samuel Pufendorf's works on natural law contain a sentimentalist theory of morality that is Smithian in its moral psychology. Pufendorf's account of how ordinary people make moral judgements and come to act sociably is surprisingly similar to Smith's. Both thinkers maintain that the human desire for esteem, manifested by resentment and gratitude, informs people of the content of central moral norms and can motivate them to act accordingly. Finally, we suggest that given Pufendorf's theory (...) of socially imposed moral entities, he has all the resources for a sentimentalist theory of morality. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that the seventeenth-century natural lawyers constructed the minimal requirement for social coordination between self-seeking individuals animated by the desire for self-preservation. On most interpretations, Grotius and his successors focused on the “perfect” duties (rules of justice) and had little to say about the “imperfect” duties of love and civility. This essay provides an alternative reading of post-Grotian natural law by reconstructing Pufendorf’s and Locke’s understanding of how the duties of civility and love might be realised in (...) civil society. The essay argues that, for Pufendorf and Locke, the desire for esteem offers an explanation of how people recognize the content of the reciprocal duties of social morality and motivate themselves to act accordingly. The reconstruction of their views on the beneficial effects of esteem-seeking points towards a new interpretation of how, and why, philosophical interest in an economy of esteem and the social nature of the self emerged, prior to their treatment by eighteenth-century authors such as Hume and Smith. (shrink)

R. G. Collingwood's re-enactment doctrine has been widely discussed in recent years by his commentators. However, most philosophers who discuss the re-enactment doctrine touch only briefly on his view of the identity of thoughts. This is surprising because Collingwood claims that the historian's successful re-enactment of the thought behind the historical agent's action involves re-thinking the same thought as the agent and not merely a copy of his thought.

Thomas Hobbes’s radical tendency to view natural law as a means of individual self-preservation sparked critical responses among natural law theorists in England and continental Europe. This chapter compares how two of Hobbes’s immediate successors and critics – Richard Cumberland and Samuel Pufendorf – dealt with the potential conflict between self-interest and the requirements of natural law. The chapter shows how both intended to reply to Hobbes in their own distinctive ways by attempting to show that the ultimate aim of (...) natural law, imposed by God, obligated people to promote the common good of humankind as a whole rather than mainly function as the means for individual and social utility. They did not, however, consider self-interest to be merely destructive for social cooperation and natural law. Both argued in their distinct ways that self-interest is the most effective motivation for people to consider the advantage of others and it leads them to promote the common good. This chapter also points out notable differences between Cumberland’s and Pufendorf’s treatment of the relation between the private good and the common good. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show that the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in Hegel’s mature Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences contains the outlines of a philosophically rich notion of the constitutive temporality of subjectivity. The temporality of the being of Hegel’s concrete subject is intimately connected with embodiment and sociality, and is thus an essential element of its fully detranscendentalized inner-worldly nature.

This paper discusses critically W.V. Quine's relation to the tradition of pragmatism. Even though Quine is often regarded as a pragmatist, it is far from clear what his commitment to pragmatism actually amounts to. It is argued that while there are pragmatist elements in Quine's position, this is not sufficient to classify him as a pragmatist in any strong historical sense; indeed, he was not even clear himself what it means to be a pragmatist. It is also shown that neither (...) Quine's philosophy nor pragmatism are as anti-metaphysical as has sometimes been thought. In order to enrich the picture of Quine's place in the pragmatist tradition, some neopragmatist criticisms of his ideas (e.g., by Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty) are also discussed. (shrink)

This unique collection examines the connections between two complementary approaches to philosophical social theory: Hegel-inspired theories of recognition, and analytical social ontology.

There is today a wide consensus that ‘recognition’ is something that we need a clear grasp of in order to understand the dynamics of political struggles, and, perhaps the constitution and dynamics of social reality more generally. Yet, the discussions on ‘recognition’ have so far often been conceptually rather inexplicit, in the sense that the very key concepts have remained largely unexplicated or undefined. Since the English word ‘recognition’ is far from unambiguous, it is possible, and to our mind also (...) actually the case, that different authors have meant partly different things with this word. In what follows, we will make a number of conceptual distinctions and clarificatory proposals that are meant to bring to sharper focus the field of phenomena that are being discussed under the catchword ‘recognition’. This is meant to serve a dual purpose: to suggest a number of distinctions which are of help in formulating rival views, and to propose what strikes us as the best overall position formulated in terms of those distinctions. (shrink)

This chapter examines first two broadly Hegelian variations of the freedom-justice connection by Axel Honneth and Rainer Forst, and then critically contrasts them with Hegel’s own concept of “concrete freedom” as the immanent ideal of social life and Hegel’s state as its “actuality.” I argue that this concept is capacious enough to do justice both to the human capacity in principle for context-transcending reflection on the justness of the social order central for Forst and to the limitations in practice of (...) individuals and groups for transcending the embeddedness and particularity of their perspectives emphasized by Honneth. The question of what makes a theory of a good society also a theory of justice is raised at the beginning with regard to Honneth’s account, and a reason stemming from the ontology of objective spirit is suggested at the end with regard to Hegel’s. (shrink)

Summary: Recognition, subjectivity and the human life form.

In spite of doubts in many quarters there seems to be considerable confidence in the benefits of health examinations. In my opinion it is important to analyze the structure and the purpose of the examinations in order to elucidate the practical thinking and logical quality of OHS. In this article I will conceive health examination as an information process and offer types of inference, i.e. prediction, abduction and induction, feasible for the analysis. I will study the logical conditions and possibilities (...) to draw conclusions using these inference methods and try, in a preliminary way, to show how the qualitative or quantitative formulations of presuppositions affect the formulation of the conclusion. Finally I will explicate the implicit purposes of the health examinations stipulated by Finnish legislation with the aid of the above inference methods. I find the methods feasible for analyzing the information process, and will set forth some conditions for presuppositions used with inference and point out the alternative purposes of Finnish occupational health examinations. (shrink)

Samuel Pufendorf’s major work on natural law, De jure nature et gentium, included a long chapter on the power of the civil sovereign to determine the value of citizens. There, Pufendorf identified several forms of esteem (existimatio), according to which human beings are ranked in social life. The article argues that behind Pufendorf’s discussion of this topic was the idea that the way people esteem others and want others to esteem them has profound consequences for maintaining peaceful social life and (...) is therefore morally regulated by the fundamental natural-law duty to maintain sociality. The article explores the key elements of Pufendorf’s multifaceted analyses of esteem, making apparent how they were connected to sociality. The article also analyses Pufendorf’s argument for the duty to esteem other humans as one’s equals by nature, questioning the view that this relied on the idea of human dignity understood as an intrinsic value of human beings. Pufendorf’s argument for this duty was a part of same project as his analyses of existimatio, namely, to define how natural law regulates the way human beings esteem each other, and it relied on his observations concerning the character of human self-esteem. (shrink)

In his review essay on World Statehood, Morgan poses three questions, namely: does my conceptualization imply conflation of agency and structure; is the realist processual account of time contradictory; and have we humans already reached the limit of the possible? I address each question briefly one at a time, arguing that the concept of self-transformative capacity of contexts does not imply conflation; that various processes with different durations can exhibit patterns that can be reasonably discussed and assessed and, with caution, (...) also used in anticipations; and that there is no cosmic law or limit that inevitably hinders humanity's further progress. (shrink)