This article contributes to research on the regulation of technological risks in the form of a case study of the Baltic Sea ferry traffic. The analysis suggests that the social systemic features of an industry heavily influence the relationship between technological failures and risk regulation. The study augments recent work on how regulations affect the handling of technological risks and how failures influence regulatory arrangements. These issues have already been studied in the context of aviation, auto, chemical, nuclear power, and (...) railway industries, but not in shipping. As an extension to previous literature, the authors also explore how different regulatory organizations in this industry act in relation to risks and how they influence each other in risk regulation activities. The study highlights the indirect relationships between technological failures and risk regulation arrangements. It also underlines the influence of the involved actors on the regulatory responses to technological failures. (shrink)

This article argues that previous research on the outcomes of corporate responsibility should be refined in two ways. First, although there is abundant research that addresses the link between corporate responsibility (CR) and financial performance, hardly any studies scrutinize whether the type of corporate responsibility makes a difference to this link. Second, while the majority of CR research conducted within business studies concentrates on the financial outcomes for the firm, the societal outcomes of CR are left largely unexplored. To tackle (...) these two deficiencies, this article extends the different conceptualizations of corporate responsibility and elaborates both the financial and the societal outcomes of different types of CR. (shrink)

According to the received view, Marxian (ideology) critique and Foucaultian (genealogical) critique constitute two divergent approaches of critical theory that have remarkably different goals and little in common. In this article, however, we identify a guiding thread that connects the Marxian and Foucaultian traditions and motivates a distinctive approach within critical theory we call the ‘critique of constitution’. The problem of restricted consciousness, we show, is the core problem in common between Michel Foucault's critical history of thought and Georg Lukács's (...) theory of reification which underlies the tradition of Western Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory. The problem concerns the limits of intelligibility and, by the same token, the apparent inevitability of the given social ontology. Our sense of what is possible depends on what we are able to think. But we know from the history of sciences that the limits of intelligibility change, thereby also altering our sense of what is possible. This becomes a political problem in connection with the intelligibility of social reality, because our restricted consciousness limits the alternatives we can so much as consider and seek to bring about. The critique of constitution, then, aims to expand the scope of possibility by revealing the contingent formation of the given limits of intelligibility. We argue that this is the paramount political task for Foucault and Lukács alike, other important differences notwithstanding. (shrink)

Many realist writings exemplify the spirit of ‘recipe realism’. Here I characterise recipe realism, challenge it, and propose replacing it with ‘exemplar realism’. This alternative understanding of realism is more piecemeal, robust, and better in tune with scientists’ own attitude towards their best theories, and thus to be preferred.

In this article I shall undertake a preliminary exploration of the notion of second best. I shall follow a three-step strategy. First, I shall introduce some applications of the theorem of the second best in different fields of philosophy and social sciences. Secondly, I shall make several conceptual distinctions related to the theorem. I aim to show that there are certain theoretical results that are similar but not identical to the theorem of the second best, and that the notion of (...) second best is often used quite loosely. Finally, I shall try to shed some light on the question of how the theorem is description-sensitive. The overall aim of the paper is to pay attention to the generality of the problem of the second best and stress the importance of the theorem in political theory in particular. (shrink)

Background: Enhancing client autonomy requires close coordination of interactional practices between nurse and client, which can cause challenges when interaction takes place in video-mediated settings. While video-mediated services have become more common, it remains unclear how they shape client autonomy in telehomecare. Research aim: To analyse how video mediation shapes client autonomy when nurses guide medicine taking remotely through video-mediated home care. Research design: This is a conversation analytic case study using video recordings of telehomecare encounters. The theoretical approach draws (...) on ethnomethodology and empirical ethics. Participants and research context: Four home-dwelling older adults and three nurses participated in the data collection; data extracts include one client and two nurses. The study was conducted in Finland. Ethical considerations: Special attention was given to protect the rights of home care clients. An ethical statement for the study was given by the Ethics Committee of the Tampere Region Findings: Video mediation complicates interacting remotely with care-relevant artefacts because of nurses’ limited visual access to the medicine and client’s need to simultaneously engage in vocal interaction and medicine taking. This can be overcome by dividing the guidance into manageable steps which invite the client to explicate their readiness to take the medicine and situating the video-mediation equipment and medicine close together. Different interactional practices and ways of situating video-mediation equipment and medicine have consequences for client autonomy. Discussion: Understanding client autonomy in digitalised settings demands empirical examination that recognises the importance of different human and non-human aspects of care that shape client autonomy. Conclusions: To harness the benefits of video-mediated home care, communication technologies’ reliance on home space and interactional practices should be recognised. Empirical ethics research is needed in order to make normative suggestions that fit a wide variety of care situation. (shrink)

For several decades, Antonio Gramsci has been one of the most studied and discussed political theorists; however, his originality as a political thinker has not yet been fully understood. In this incisive book, Sakari Hänninen explores Gramsci's political theory of transformation and posits that he was altogether too creative a thinker to be simply categorized as an adherent of a certain school of thought or tradition. Following Gramsci's own advice to trace the stable and permanent elements of a thinker's (...) intellectual development in statu nascendi, Hänninen argues that Gramsci's thinking was distinct and superior to the material he studied. Chapters examine the central question of his exilic writing in prison: political, historical and societal transformation - generated by struggle and strife giving birth to something qualitatively new and unforeseen - as a pluritemporal 'becoming' rather than unilinear development. The book further investigates Gramsci's modal analysis of political transformation moving from Marxian necessity to Machiavellian opportunity. Political Creativity: Antonio Gramsci on Political Transformation will be an enlightening read for students and scholars in the fields of political, social and historical science, particularly political theory, cultural studies and European politics. Its insights will also benefit political and civic activists, civil society agencies and think tanks. (shrink)

In this article, the authors investigate the applicability and usefulness of three alternative perspectives on corporate issues management: issue life cycle theory, legitimacy theory, and stakeholder theory. Each perspective makes certain as- sumptions about the nature of issues management activities and certain general predictions about corporate social responsiveness. The authors test the relative applicability of the three theories through a case study of the issues management activities of four large forestry companies in Finland and Canada. The authors conclude that all (...) three perspectives have value but differ in the level of analysis and time frame to which they apply. (shrink)

The literature on the indispensability argument for mathematical realism often refers to the ‘indispensable explanatory role’ of mathematics. I argue that we should examine the notion of explanatory indispensability from the point of view of specific conceptions of scientific explanation. The reason is that explanatory indispensability in and of itself turns out to be insufficient for justifying the ontological conclusions at stake. To show this I introduce a distinction between different kinds of explanatory roles—some ‘thick’ and ontologically committing, others ‘thin’ (...) and ontologically peripheral—and examine this distinction in relation to some notable ‘ontic’ accounts of explanation. I also discuss the issue in the broader context of other ‘explanationist’ realist arguments. (shrink)

In the Ancient world poverty was a visible and common phenomenon. According to estimations 9 out of 10 persons lived close to the subsistence level or below it. There was no middle class. The state did not show much concern for the poor. Inequality and disability to improve one's social status were based on honour and shame, culture and religion. In order to understand the activity of Jesus and the early Jesus movement in Galilee, it is essential to know the (...) social and economic context where he and his followers came. The principal literary source in first-century Galilee is Josephus, who provides a very incomplete glimpse of the political and economic character of the Galilee and his account is both tendentious and self-serving. There is no consensus among the scholars on the conditions of ordinary people in Galilee at the time of Jesus and the early Jesus movement. The evidence can be interpreted either so that first-century Galilee was peaceful and people had somewhat better times economically because of the large building projects, or just the opposite - the building projects demanded a lot more taxes and forced labour and made life even more difficult. In this article it is argued that the latter conditions explain better the birth and rapid increase of the early Jesus movement in Galilee. (shrink)

Matthias Egg argues that scientific realism can be reconciled with quantum mechanics and its foundational underdetermination by focusing realist commitments on ‘effective’ ontology. I argue in general terms that Egg’s effective realism is ontologically overly promiscuous. I illustrate the issue in relation to both Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics.

We demonstrate how real progress can be made in the debate surrounding the enhanced indispensability argument. Drawing on a counterfactual theory of explanation, well-motivated independently of the debate, we provide a novel analysis of ‘explanatory generality’ and how mathematics is involved in its procurement. On our analysis, mathematics’ sole explanatory contribution to the procurement of explanatory generality is to make counterfactual information about physical dependencies easier to grasp and reason with for creatures like us. This gives precise content to key (...) intuitions traded in the debate, regarding mathematics’ procurement of explanatory generality, and adjudicates unambiguously in favour of the nominalist, at least as far as explanatory generality is concerned. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Edmund Husserl strongly emphasized the importance of reduction to his phenomenology. For his followers, however, it has proved a formidable task to specify exactly how this intricate accomplishment that opens up the possibility for phenomenological research is to be performed. In this article, we study different approaches to gaining access to reduction and conclude by suggesting that we should read Husserliana itself as a set of accomplished reductions. In other words, our task is to pinpoint chapters where the movement (...) of reduction takes place. As an example of such a reading, I will point out events that come about in Husserl???s Idea of Phenomenology. R??SUM?? Husserl a fortement insist?? sur l???importance de la r??duction dans sa ph??nom??nologie. Pour ses disciples, cependant, s???est av??r????tre redoutable la t??che de pr??ciser comment doit??tre ex??cut??e cette r??alisation complexe qui ouvre la possibilit?? pour la recherche ph??nom??nologique. Dans cet article, nous??tudions les diff??rentes approches de la r??duction et nous concluons en sugg??rant que l???ouvrage Husserliana lui-m??me doit se lire comme un ensemble de r??ductions accomplies. Notre t??che consistera donc?? identifier les chapitres o?? a lieu ce mouvement de r??duction.?? titre d???exemple d???une telle lecture, j?????voquerai quelques-uns des??v??nements de L???id??e de la ph??nom??nologie de Husserl. (shrink)

Georg Henrik von Wright always mentioned that his academic teachers had been Eino Kaila and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He even spoke of the two as his “father figures”. Georg Henrik was a sunny boy, but his “fathers” appear to be quite enigmatic. An industry of philosophical literature is needed to interpret Wittgenstein. Kaila seems to be at most a minor figure with some contacts to the Vienna Circle. It is not wrong to see von Wright as a follower of Wittgenstein, and (...) von Wright’s life-long work was decisive for the fact that all of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass is now available. In what follows, I will concentrate more on Kaila and his Viennese connections than on Wittgenstein. I make an attempt of trying to see the two “fathers” from a perspective that was or at least could have been von Wright’s contemporary view. Vienna – or, more accurately – the recent past of Vienna was also von Wright’s city of dreams. Kaila is an interesting case as concerns the networking typical of the Vienna Circle, especially as an example of Rudolf Carnap’s rich scientific contacts at that point of his career. It was Kaila who made the start of von Wright’s career possible and determined a number of his philosophical interests and orientations, including the specific way in which von Wright’s work can be said to be linked to the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism. Of course, after World War II “analytic philosophy” was the acceptable designation for that kind of work that von Wright was pursuing in Cambridge, but his story can not be told without attention to the impulses from Vienna. (shrink)

Towards cinematic thinking : the ontology of the virtually real in Gilles Deleuze's and Jean-Luc Godard's conceptions of cinema.

My colleague Harri Laakso suggested in one of his presentations that we should stop talking about the different types of knowing and admit, or even emphatically argue, that in art we are dealing with something that is "otherwise-than-knowing". Harri Laakso's remark suddenly shed light on an issue that was partly clouded and partly lit: why is it important to so many that art remain art, and why are so many interested in doing research that is based on artistic activity and (...) that takes seriously art's own way of operating, its manifestations and methods of conveying something to others, either through whispers, screams or discussions? These meditations stem from the frenzied thinking and discussion going on in art universities around the world. Art is seen as the ability to change the world, not by money or force, but by orientation: by radically transforming the "sensible", or sensory, reality of the eye, ear, taste, touch and smell, which unavoidably results in a change in ideas, understanding and insight. It may be about distancing, it may be about getting closer sometimes it is irony or camp, sometimes it is a serious attempt to find illuminating concepts and their verbalisations, and sometimes it is the need to create new myths or just tell stories. (shrink)

I erect a framework within the semantic view of theories for explaining the empirical success of internally inconsistent models and theories, with scientific realism in mind. The framework is an instance of the ‘content-driven’ approach to inconsistency, advocated by both Norton (Philos Sci 54:327–350, 1987) and Smith (Stud Hist Philos Sci 19:429–445, 1988a, In: Fine A, Leplin J (eds) PSA1988, 1988b), whose ideas my analysis aims to clarify and substantiate.

The Pessimistic Induction from falsity of past theories forms a perennial argument against scientific realism. This paper considers and rebuts two recent arguments—due to Lewis (2001) and Lange (2002)—to the conclusion that the Pessimistic Induction (in its best known form) is fallacious. It re-establishes the dignity of the Pessimistic Induction by calling to mind the basic objective of the argument, and hence restores the propriety of the realist program of responding to PMI by undermining one or another of its premises.

Climate change conspiracy theories raise many questions. Some of the questions are philosophical in nature. They include issues such as how to define “conspiracy theory” (a conceptual question), what the ethical status of conspiracy theorizing is (a moral question), and how decision-makers should deal with climate change conspiracy theories (a practical question). One way to define “climate change conspiracy theory” is to say that they are explanations that (1) refer to conspiracies, (2) are not in line with more or less (...) unanimous views of the climate scientists, and (3) offer clearly insufficient evidence in support of the alleged conspiracies: Relevant experts find the evidence so bad that the theories are not considered even as competing explanations. Climate change conspiracy theories are ethically problematic. The theories tend to reduce individual persons’ commitment to cut down their carbon footprint. More generally, conspiracy theories undermine trust toward epistemic authorities and social institutions generally. There is no agreement on what the right policy toward climate change conspiracy theories would be, but there are many options. Increasing social trust is among them. (shrink)

Gegenwartig, da ein neues Europa errichtet wird, ist es wieder aktuell, nach dem philosophischen und wissenschaftlichen Erbe der kleineren Lander Europas zu fragen, die in der international dominierenden Forschung oft im Schatten geblieben sind. Fern von den Machtzentren existierten dort aber auch Freiheiten und Betatigungsrahmen, wie sie ein Zentrum nicht unbedingt gestattet hatte. Dieses Buch behandelt zumeist unerforschte und unbekannte Materialien aus Schweden, Finnland und Osterreich und zeigt diese sowohl in ihren Kontakten zu den Zentren als auch in ihren lokalen (...) Kontexten: einen Benjamin Hoijer etwa, der in Schweden die Philosophie J.G. Fichtes weiterfuhrte, oder auch die Transformationen des Hegelschen und Feuerbachschen Erbes im europaischen Norden. Die Spannweite von Manninens Studien erstreckt sich von den Reaktionen auf die europaische Aufklarung und die Franzosische Revolution bis hin zum Radikalismus des Wiener Kreises. -In der Sache geht es Juha Manninen immer wieder um das eine: um Vernetzungen und Widerspruche der europaischen Geistesgeschichte sichtbar zu machen und die festgefahrenen Bahnen unlinearer wie nationaler Geschichtsschreibung zu durchbrechen.- (Georg Gimpl)". (shrink)

Kirchhoff’s diffraction theory is introduced as a new case study in the realism debate. The theory is extremely successful despite being both inconsistent and not even approximately true. Some habitual realist proclamations simply cannot be maintained in the face of Kirchhoff’s theory, as the realist is forced to acknowledge that theoretical success can in some circumstances be explained in terms other than truth. The idiosyncrasy (or otherwise) of Kirchhoff’s case is considered.

Vol. 10 includes "Tables générales des Séries de publications de Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1838-1938.".

Should we mke an effort to revitalize politics? This book with its its collection of essays challenges such an oxymoronic phrase. DISPLACEMENT OF POLITICS implies that politics only takes place by displacing itself, by way of constant self-transformation. The dynamics of politics can only be captured by moving concepts, addressed by poltiical theory in contrast.

Should we mke an effort to revitalize politics? This book with its its collection of essays challenges such an oxymoronic phrase. DISPLACEMENT OF POLITICS implies that politics only takes place by displacing itself, by way of constant self-transformation. The dynamics of politics can only be captured by moving concepts, addressed by poltiical theory in contrast.

In this paper I will discuss the causes of global inequality. I will argue that there may be other important reasons for poverty than Western selfishness. Further, I will claim that most Western people believe that for one reason or another it is practically impossible to eradicate poverty, and that this shared belief itself may be a cause for why it is practically impossible to eradicate it in the near future. The question is about an unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy. In my (...) view, it is important to consider the background and logic of this prophecy. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the changes in managers’ moral attitudes, stakeholder orientation and economic interests from 1994 to 2004. Dataare presented concerning 8-10 stakeholder groups and 50-58 moral issues.

According to the so-called presumption of equality, a person who does not know whether there is an acceptable reason for differential treatment should just presume the similarity of the cases and treat them equally. If we assume that the presumption of equality is an acceptable moral principle, at least when the allocation cannot be postponed and an equal distribution of goods is possible, then an important question arises: when exactly does the allocator have sufficient reasons for differential treatment and is (...) not relevantly ignorant? This is a question about the required strength of the “acceptable reasons” for differential treatment. It has been commonplace to think that the presumption of equality demands that the reasons that refute the presumption must be very strong and that differential treatment requires that there is a proper justification for the claim that the cases are relevantly different. I will argue, however, that refuting the presumption and solving the issue are two separate matters. A person can have good enough reasons for rejecting the presumption that the cases are relevantly similar without having reasons that she could present as a full justification for the claim that the cases are relevantly different. A precondition of the applicability of the presumption of equality is ignorance, but not ignorance in the sense of “not having a full justification”. (shrink)

The article discusses the relationship between the notion of a moral right to personal self‐determination, the notion of a moral right to know and the notion of a moral right not to know. In particular, the author asks under what conditions, if any, the right to self‐determination implies a right to have information or a right not to have information. The conclusions he defends are theoretical in character rather than concrete norms and directions, and they are intended to be relevant (...) in many contexts, not only in the context of information concerning, say, medical decisions. Yet the author restates the question concerning the right to have and especially the right not to have genetic knowledge about one's own genes on the basis of a right to self‐determination. He argues that a right (not) to have genetic information can be defended on the ground of a right to self‐determination, but that this kind of defense presupposes several normative, and controversial, arguments. (shrink)

Examining a variety of bio-objects in contexts beyond the laboratory, Bio-Objects: Life in the 21st Century explores new ways of thinking about how novel bio-objects enter contemporary life, analysing the manner in which the boundaries between human and animal, organic and non-organic, and being 'alive' and the suspension of living, are questioned, destabilised and in some cases re-established.

The question of who has the burden of proof is often important in practice. We must frequently make decisions and act on the basis not of conclusive evidence but of what is reasonable to presume true. Consequently, it happens that a given practical question must be solved by referring to principles that explicitly or implicitly determine, at least partly, where the burden of proof should rest. In this essay, I consider the role of the logic of the burden of proof (...) in a debate on global justice. In particular, I ask how the logic of the burden of proof is seen by those who defend conservative positions in a debate and deny our obligations to reduce poverty beyond borders. I argue that defenders of conservative positions tend to shift the burden of proof in an unjustified way. (shrink)