TIEDE & EDISTYS 1/2003 SUMMARIES

Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen: On historical ontology. This article analyses two concepts that Ian Hacking has elaborated in his recent writings: ?historical ontology? and ?styles of reasoning?. At the same time, the article examines the reasons why and the way in which Hacking takes distance from the generalizing talk of ?social constructionism?. The focus is on Hacking?s recent writings and on the way he positions philosophical work in relation to other scientific practices. Hacking conceives philosophy as analysis of concepts in their sites. In practice, this means recurrent passage between traditional philosophical formulations and new knowledge that is created in specific scientific practices. The importance of philosophical work is located neither in the general concepts in themselves, nor in the individual findings produced by empirical studies, but rather, in the movement between these two areas. In general, the article argues that the specific merit of Hacking?s writings is his capability to relate different modes of reasoning with each other in his concrete analyses of the formation of scientific knowledge, both in the natural sciences and in the social sciences; simultaneously, he is able to show the relevance of traditional philosophical questions to the empirical work.

Petri Ylikoski: Ian Hacking and the Creation of Phenomena. The article discusses three central themes in the philosophy of Ian Hacking. The first is his interest in the material dimensions of science. Experimental sciences materially create some of the phenomena they study and Hacking uses this as a basis for his argument for causal scientific realism. The second theme is Hacking?s interest in classification within the sciences. He argues that some of the classifications within the human sciences are interactive: there is a feedback mechanism between the classification and the people classified. The third theme is the idea of the style of scientific reasoning developed by Hacking.

Yrjö Haila: Why/how is experimental science stabilized? Practices and the progress of research. Thomas Kuhn?s theory of scientific revolutions changed our understanding of the progress of science: monotonous accumulation of knowledge was replaced with abrupt shifts from one paradigm to another. This, however, brings up a new problem, as Ian Hacking has noticed: research practices have not changed at similar pace. ? The starting point of my article is Ian Hacking?s idea that ?when the laboratory sciences are practicable at all, they tend to produce a sort of self-vindicating structure that keeps them stable.? I explore this thesis using examples mainly from the biological sciences; a good example is offered by Robert Kohler?s analysis of the research on Drosophila genetics in T. H. Morgan?s laboratory from the 1910s onwards. The phenomena studies in the laboratory are material constructs and hence, of course, real. However, generalizing laboratory results to external world becomes problematic. I discuss the prerequisites of reliable generalizations and predictions based on science, using recent work by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers as another reference. I conclude that such philosophy of science, which is sensitive to the demands of practical scientific work, can open novel possibilities for sound and intelligent research.

Mikko Jauho: Genealogies of the Normal. The article presents the concept of the normal that is familiar from the biopolitical approach of Michel Foucault and others; some lines of its historical development are traced as well. Two contexts of the emergence of the concept are taken up: firstly, the collection of statistical information and its analysis in terms of probabilities, averages and variation; and secondly, the rise of clinical medicine with corresponding changes in the concept of life and the status of the distinction between the normal and the pathological. Finally, the intersection of these two contexts in the birth of a statistically oriented science of the social is discussed.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 2/2003 SUMMARIES

Markku Koivusalo: Hannah Arendt and the men of action. In this article Arendt?s The Human Condition is shown to be one of the most important works on political philosophy today. On the basis of a discussion on Arendt?s oeuvre and its relation to Aristotle, Heidegger, Marx and Kant, several critical questions regarding contemporary political thought and society are raised.

Paul-Erik Korvela: Why was Machiavelli shocking? The article aims to establish that if we study the early reception of Machiavelli, we find that the shocking element in his writings consisted of two partly overlapping features: his blatant secularism in harnessing religion to serve politics, and his criticism of Christianity. His true message, which was no news to any literate contemporaries, was that politics, or arte dello stato, is by nature always immoral, always anti-Christian. The classical tradition had assumed that from good deeds, only good consequences could follow, and from bad deeds, only bad ones. Machiavelli?s shock to the Western thought is in the claim that cases of necessity occur not only accidentally, but regularly, naturally and normally. For Machiavelli, expedient wickedness is fundamental to the political order ? not only when a prior transgression has shaken up the moral world, but also in its normal condition. This view espoused by Machiavelli is the opposite of the ethical community of classical antiquity, where human beings are considered friends and intimates.

Kai Eriksson: On the Topology of Networks. Contemporary society can no longer be thought of as independent of the network concept. This is due to the transformation and breaking away from the metaphor of hierarchy by discourses, theories, images and institutions. The paper investigates the space occupied by the network metaphor during the past few decades. It takes as an example two distinctive theoreticians who have tried to systematically map out the conditions of a ?network?, namely Manuel Castells and Albert-László Barabási. The analysis attempts to elucidate why the issue of ?networks? is not primarily a question of a conceptual tool but rather one that should be approached ontologically.

Jaana Parviainen: Movement Mathematized and Kinaesthesia. Galileo?s work and classical mechanics opened the road to the math- ematical reconstruction of the movement in the 17th century. The ?mathematized movement? has culturally dominated our notion of movement, while the other relevant aspects of the movement are overlooked. The article introduces Aristotle?s idea of kinesis and, in particular, Edmund Husserl?s notion of movement, kinaesthesia. Discussing kinaesthetic sensations, Husserl considers how they interact with visual movements developing ?kinaesthetic fields?. For Husserl, kinaesthesia seems to form the basis from which intentionality is to be understood, and within which perception itself must be integrated.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 3/2003 SUMMARIES

Philippe Van Haute: Antigone, Heroin of Psychoanalysis? In this article Philippe Van Haute challenges Jacques Lacan's Heideggerian reading of Sophocles' Antigone - at least as a paradigmatic example of the ethics of psychoanalysis. Van Haute's key point is that, in Antigone, the only real personal change takes place in Creon after the intervention of blind Tiresias. Thus if the aim of psychoanalysis is some kind of change in the analysand, the hero of Antigone would rather be Creon than Antigone. In a way, Antigone's fascination may have prevented Lacan from finding Tiresias in himself.

Ari Hirvonen: The Ethics of Tragedy. The starting point is that tragedy sets the question of justice in a fundamental way: what justice is in itself, what is the correct law and how it is possible for the human being to be right? Hegel's interpretation of tragedy in The Phenomenology of Spirit has dominated the modern theory of tragedy. However, I read tragedy through Friedrich Hölderlin, who will understand the essence of tragedy more fundamentally than Hegel. At first I concentrate on Hölderlin's attempt to write a modern tragedy, The Death of Empedocles. However, this attempt does not work out, and Hölderlin begins to translate Sophocles' tragedies Oedipus the King and Antigone. It is in these translations and in his remarks to them that Hölderlin's "theory" of tragedy is worked out. Hölderlin's "concepts" (tragic transport, caesura, categorical turn and native turn etc.) are elaborated in order to understand how - through Hölderlin - one is able to understand the question of justice in the tragedy. In the end, there is not one answer but five answers - which are intertwined - to the question of justice. They are expressed in 1) the tragic conflict, 2) the categorical turn, 3) Antigone's figure, 4) the caesura, and 5) the poet himself. I argue that Hölderlin opens a new "theory" of tragedy, which is actually yet to come.

Esa Kirkkopelto: Introduction to the Theory of Stage. The analysis of the phenomenon of theatrical representation leads us to suppose that our experience of the apparition of another human being is always mediated by a certain scenic precomprehension: by his action an acting, speaking human being opens up a dimension of representation, a stage (scène), which also enables the artistic representation of that action. In the history of philosophy the human figure has a priviledged position, for it is only within its limits that it is possible to establish a connection between the ideal and the sensible, the inside and the outside, on which depends the whole metaphysical and symbolic order. For the same reason action on stage has always posed a serious problem to Western metaphysics. If that tradition is considered from the theatrical point of view, different philosophical enterprises to theorize human apparition can be analyzed as different theories of stage. The first and the most influential one is met with Plato, who founds that apparition on the presence of the human figure. Specifically, all interpretations of tragedy that put emphasis on the sublime effect and on the sacrificial act are based on this kind of eidetic theory of stage. In Aristotle, the effort to critisize tragedy on theoretical basis ends up to a certain mise en scene of the theoretical attitude itself. A theory of stage, better in harmony with the conditions of theatrical representation, should be able to surpass the paradigm of the presence of the human figure and to indicate the connection between the phenomenon of human action and the transcendental structure of our experience, beyond the metaphysics of presence.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 4/2003 SUMMARIES

Maurice Florence: Foucault. Finnish translation of a short introduction of the oeuvre of Michel Foucault by Foucault himself.

Kai Eriksson: Noise and Communication. Insofar as it has been emphasized governance of and by communication, science as guarantor of unequivocality has always replaced multiplicity and disagreement, message noise. But noise is however an integral part of message itself. Therefore the postwar history has intensified attempts to think communication and noise together, so that the latter does not appear only as the source of disorder but also as its material part. Noise is thus absolutely necessary for communication. On the other hand, in order to make a shared meaning possible, a remarkable part of this noise has to be excluded. Communication has to be given a form in order to be distinguished from noise. Communication itself, however, cannot be given any single form: it escapes all formalizations. This movement of sharing and excluding, form-giving and fleeing from formalization is what determines the field of communication. The paper investigates the ways this movement has got its expression especially in the writings of Latour and Callon.

Yrjö Haila: The Meaningful Order of the World and Nature. Nature has to be taken into account in social planning; this goal was gradually accepted during the 20th century in Finland. Conservation ideals of the late 19th century were in the background. However, during the 20th century nature conservation widened to include also areas under human influence, largely as a consequence of environmental conflicts. The article analyses this change, using Bruno Latour's idea of "modern constitution" as a framework. The modern constitution drew a strict division line between nature and culture. The need to preserve culturally defined natural objects undermines this dualistic assumption.

Markus Laine: Fight Over the Faces of Tampere - A Sneaking Transformation of City's Habitus. In the decades following the Second World War, political power in Tampere remained unquestionably in the hands of the same ruling coalition. The situation started to change, however, from the early 1970s onwards. This process of change peaked in 1989 with a dispute over the reconstruction of an old industrial area in the city. It could be characterised as a local critical event. To analyse the cultural dimension of this political transition in Tampere, I will draw upon Pierre Bourdieu's concept of field, symbolic capital, and habitus. I argue that conflict over symbolic capital in a political field is three dimensional. It concerns 1) contents, 2) styles of politics and 3) positions within society of the parties involved. The legitimacy of the symbolic capital is linked to the habitus of the city, which ties, as I argue, historical cultural and material transformations together.

Ville Haukkala: Warehouses or Music Hall - a Symbolic dispute in the Front Yard of the House of Parliament. The front yard of the Finnish House of Parliament became the centre of several symbolic disputes when the city of Helsinki wanted to tear down the old railway warehouses situated there and build a music hall instead. The warehouses became a symbol for citizen participation in the urban planning due to the several small-scale activities taking place there. The symbolic protest set a complex political process in motion. During the process the dispute was framed in several ways. The symbolic protest politicised the relationship between the urban government and the citizen, the contents of urban culture and the methods of professional planning and created an arena for discussing the issues.