SUMMARY 1/2009

Raimo Lovio: Creative Destruction - Everlasting Hope. Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) was one of the great names of the 20th century among social scientists, especially in economics. His most well-known concept is creative destruction. Schum­peter's innovation oriented evolutionary economics is an original combination of neoclassical, historical and Marxian economics with great emphasis on methodological diversity. His vision is topical today due to the current technological pro­gress and financial crises, even though modern innovation studies have empirically went beyond Schumpeter, and even though Schumpeter could not foresee the growing importance of welfare state and "crowdsourcing" as new innovation me­­c­ha­­nisms.

Markku Koivusalo: The Creative Prin­ce of Capitalism and the Headless Horseman. The article is an extensive introduction to Joseph A. Schumpeter's thought on the process of creative destruction. This thought is in itself seen as the very expression of the creative destruction and linked to its historical, intellectual and personal conditions. Here Schumpeter's turbulent life, his passions and the specific form of his own economic thought, is analysed in the light of the process of creative destruction. The article discusses al­so Schumpeter's methodo­logy, his intellectual influences, and his theories of innovation, politics and especially his image of passionate capitalism. The metaphor of creative destruction is compared with the metaphor of invisible hand and their cor­res­ponding images of capitalism is analy­sed. In the end the tragic source and aspect of Schum­peter's narrative on capitalism is exposed.

Yrjö Haila: Schumpeter, the Dynamics of Capitalism, Today - Tomorrow. Jospeph Schumpeter was among the great 20th century economists the one who paid attention to the dynamic nature of capitalism. He was interested in economy as a real, material process mediating the relationship between humanity and the rest of the world. This is what makes his legacy important also when pondering upon the future of the capitalist economy. As Schumpeter noticed early on, the relationship between the economy and the rest of the world is not immediately vi­sible. The productive forces of nature on which the economy depends - land and labour - are "economized", that is, their material substance is hidden behind economic patterns and processes. The economy is an emergent phenomenon which is successfully "masking" the productive forces of nature. I trace the historical stages of this development using Schumpeter's ouvre as a source. Against this backgrund, I reflect upon the causes and consequences of the current global economic crisis, especially upon what the crisis implies for economic policies aiming at sustainable deve­lopment.

Chuck Dyke: Tracing Schumpeter. The ran­ge of theories of self-organizing systems is the natural home for Joseph Schumpeter's notion Creative Destruction. Schumpeter used "biological mutation" as his key ana­logy. The historical trajector of biological systems cannot be accounted for by linear explanation. Yet, patterns of stability and instability do emerge, making possible an understanding of the appearance of novelty. That's the sort of thing that Schumpeter was groping towards. Using Schumpeter's lead, I characterize the historical self-organization of capitalism. The prevailing mode of ana­lyzing capitalism is confined to the metric of wealth. This becomes explicit when, for example, it's assumed that production possibility cur­ves have no theoretical upper bound. However, we ought to take seriously the existence of such bounds. As regards capitalism, the trick then is to imagine the retention of the metric of wealth under conditions where both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of growth have to be tightly controlled. Within a Smithean framework, this is well-nigh impossible. But the challenge is real; it remains to be seen what we can salvage of the way of life that we've destructively created.

SUMMARY 2/2009 

Yasuhiko Murakami: "We did not know what happened to us" - A phenomenology of reality. In classical phe­nomenology, the sense of reality is analyzed by the concepts of passive synthesis and sedimentation of meaning. The article argues that the classical phenomenological approach is insufficient: Being prejudiced for doxic-cognitive experiences, it fails to account for the temporality of certain limit experiences, such as the panic experiences of autistic children and traumatized subjects. Drawing from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and from Lévinas' phenomeno­logy, the article develops new concepts, most importantly the concept of reality affection, which allow us to understand and characterize the sense of reality and its origin.

Adriana Petryna: Experimen­tali­ty.­ The Global Clinical Trials and the Future of Medicine. The outsourcing and offshoring of clinical trials has generated an unpre­cedented global field of experimental acti­vity.  The geography of drug development and clinical trial participation is changing, but estimates of trials being carried out worldwide remain tentative at best. This essay illuminates the scientific and regulatory mechanisms by which a field of ex­perimentality takes form. It charts the mobility of a clinical trials industry and its move into low- and middle-income count­ries, focusing on how subcontracted scientists and entrepreneurs who make up this industry interact with regulatory bodies in the United States and abroad, particularly in eastern Europe, where I carried out ethnographic research. In showing how this experimental enterprise molds itself to international norms and national politics, the essay elucidates how the recognition of adverse risks can be deferred or engineered out of the system. It also raises broader questions about how the boundaries between research and practice are negotiated in various settings.  There is a public policy vacuum with regard to how benefits and risks are being assessed in this new enterprise.

Sari Roman-Lagerspetz: Chantal Mouf­fe ja Carl Schmitt: ystäviä vai vihollisia? The article analyzes critical­ly the postmodern political thought, focusing on Chantal Mouf­fe´s agonistic politics. In Mouffe, the relation between the self and the other constitutes a primary political relation. This relation is permanently conflictual. According to Mouffe, her theory of the political relation bears a resemblance to the friend-ene­my relation in Carl Schmitt´s thought.  It is argued in this article that the political relation in Mouffe has its roots not in Schmitt but in the Kojevian interpretation of He­gel. In Kojevian Hegelianism the conflict between the self and the other is seen as a condition for politics and history; further, internal conflict cons­titutes the basic structure of particular subjects. This article shows that there is a superficial relation between Mouf­fe and Schmitt. Further, the post­mo­dern political thought is criticised for its self-contradictory ethics concerning other­ness. Even that the other is valued by theorists like Mouffe, the otherness-recognitive ethics remains an abstract "beyond" as political subjects themselves are seen as permanently incapable of a proper acknowledgement of the other. 

SUMMARY 3/2009

Juho Hotanen: What Descartes says to us. I aim to show in my article that according to Merleau-Ponty the history of philosophy is not to be understood as already thought but as a life of thought. Merleau-Ponty claims that even if we live in a different situation and think in a different way than Descartes, he can still teach us how to think. In order to realise this, we should not simply repeat what Descartes said but ask what he says to us.

Sara Heinämaa: Sickness and its interpretation: Merleau-Ponty's phenomeno­logy of injuries and disorders. The paper explicates two methodological ideas central to Merleau-Ponty's philosophical analysis of sickness. First, the paper articulates Merleau-Ponty's holistic understanding of sickness as a sensual-kinesthetic and intentional way of relating to the world and its different objectivities. Second, the paper explicates Merleau-Ponty's argument according to which phenomenology must proceed to its genetic stage, if it aims to provide an account of the essence of sickness. This means that philosophical inquiries into sickness must also ask about the experiential origin and history of its meaning.

Erika Ruonakoski: How to Study Non-Human Animals from a Merleau-Pontian Perspective? Mirror Tests and the Study of Animal Consciousness. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, the article investigates the ambiguous character of what is seen in the mirror and uses this description to elucidate the confused behavior of capuchin monkeys when exposed to a mirror. In addition, the possibilities of mirror tests (mirror self-recognition tests as well as others) in the investigation of animal awareness are explored.

Hermanni Yli-Tepsa: On bodily exis­tence and sexuality in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomeno­logy of Perception. The text examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the bodily existence in the chapter "The Body as a Sexed Being" in Phenomenology of Perception. The chapter in question is known of its descriptions of sexuality and existence as bodily phenomena. For Merleau-Ponty sexed being of the body is an originally organic function, which is integrated in the whole of existence in the course of the life of an individual. By analysing the relationship between special sexual existence and the whole of human existence, Merleau-Ponty deepens one of the central ideas in Phenomenology of Perception, namely that existence is to be described as reciprocal expression between different fields of experience and that the body is the place of this expression.

Joona Taipale: Experience and the concept "transcendental". This article elaborates the differences in the Husserlian and Kantian notions of 'transcendental' It argues that, in the Husserlian sense of the word, Merleau-Ponty can be considered as a transcendental philosopher.

SUMMARY 4/2009

Jaakko Kuorikoski & Samuli Pöyhönen: Human kinds and feedback mechanisms of social reality. The philosophical and sociological discussions concerning looping effects of human kinds (scientific classifications of people) and the performativity of the human sciences in general suffer from a metaphysical bias and overly descriptive and case-oriented methodology. These discussions are also too closely linked to grand social theorizing and unspecific social constructionist claims. This article aims to rectify this situation by using the homeostatic property-cluster theory of natural kinds in developing a causal-mechanistic middle-range account of the interaction of classifications of the human sciences and those classified.