TIEDE & EDISTYS 1/2005 SUMMARIES

Jorma Sipilä: The Responsibilities of University. In this article the Chancellor of the University of Tampere, Jorma Sipilä, discusses the responsibilities of university. This article is based on a lecture he gave in a seminar at the University of Jyväskylä.

Risto Rinne & Hannu Simola: Universities under Supranational Pressures and New Governance. The globalisation is usually seen, among countless other things, as referring to growing supranational pressures to national education policies, especially in the university sector. Not only in Finland, the drift and push towards a business-like entrepreneurial university is often seen as self-evident, inevitable and taken as granted. The article analyses these tendences, discursive bases and supra­national agencies. The focus is on new governance as university policy and politics in Finland, especially on what is called quality revolution and evaluation industry. As a conclusion and against the grain, the article refuses to see the international tendencies as necessity and without alternative. Leaning on the controversial, incompatible and contradictory character of globalisation, the conclusion of the article emphasizes historical continuities of the university institution and critical potentials of the academic society, though poorly developed in Finland so far.

Jukka Siikala: Arguments about Auditing. The application of the doctrines of new management with its emphasis on efficiency, accountability and auditing has had dramatic effects on the university system and the social conditions of scientific intellectual activities. The article argues that the application of double bookkeeping and the reduction of the effects of the totality of social activities of the scientific community to singularised entries are based on a virtual logic reminiscent of magic. It presupposes a universal causality from its impoverished model to all levels of complex scientific practice and this kind of presupposition is, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, at the heart of magic. In the state university system of Finland this leads to total reorganization of scientific activities and higher education, to externally determined, short term organizational forms, and this constant reorganization ultimately undermines the basis of scientific communities and thus the knowledge which was the product of the activities of these communities.

Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen: Making People Remember: Memory and Counter-Memory.­ The article claims that discussing memory reveals what is seen, in general, as the point of doing social sciences. Often the task of social scientific inquiry is to remind the reader of social issues. Simultaneously, recollection helps to form a collectivity, a sense of shared identity. In the works of Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau memory plays, however, a contrary role: it helps to break down and escape rigid orders of control; for both, the most important form of remembering is that of counter-memory . Towards the end of the article, the relationship between different forms of memory are discussed with the concrete example of a study on the way the violence of the year 1918 has been remembered in Finland.

Summaries 2/05

Pajari Räsänen: Au revoir. What do we say when we say "au revoir"? To say au revoir is to put one's hope upon the most uncertain thing: revoir, seeing again. Each time we say it could be the last. And we must know this. This future seeing-again is the source of uncertainty itself, all uncertainty there ever is. But it is also the source of certainty, almost all of it, all truth, all knowledge and all faith with respect to previous doubt or the very possibility of doubt. With respect to uncertainty about some past event or observation, the future seeing-again is the source of certainty: when in doubt about a previous event, the only time I can reach relative or perhaps final certainty is a future time. There are not many things of knowledge, or of belief, which a possible new observation could leave absolutely unshattered. This is a basic philosophical principle, to be sure. The cogito, ergo sum is a Cartesian relief with respect to this other principle. But there is also a cogito de l'adieu, shadowing each au revoir...

Jari Kauppinen: The End of the World. Jacques Derrida published the original French version of his The Work of Mourning (2001) entitled as Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (2003) as his book of farewells. In relation to mourning the expression of the world's end as the end of a singular world is interpreted through Paul Celan's famous phrase: "Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen" following Derrida's thought in his Gadamer memorial address Béliers. Dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème (2003). This reading is represented as a memorial for Derrida, in reference to the classical philosopher's task to learn how to die and Derrida's own idea of the impossibility to learn how to live.

Susanna Lindberg: Derrida Tracing Animals. This article examines the figure of the animal as a thread that runs through Derrida's corpus and permits to articulate several of its seemingly different strata. The animal according to the mechanist hypothesis explains the functioning of the "trace", the animal figured by the dynamist hypothesis that of the "différance". The animal's particular relation to death defines its "spectrality", that connects the question of the animal to fiction, politics and ethics.

Ari Hirvonen: Derrida - Scholar of Justice. For Derrida, deconstruction is justice. This confusing sentence he declares in his "Force de loi/Force of Law" -text which he delivered in 1989 at Cardozo Law School. For some this text, in which the question of law and justice became explicitly thematized, meant an ethical turn in Derrida's thinking. It is true that after that very text responsibility for an other, the singularity of an event, the coming justice, and problems related to law, democracy, sovereignty, globalisation, etc. became more significant than before. However, the ethical moment has always already been in Derrida's thinking. Justice and ethics, the art and sense of justice, directness, sincerity, are weft threads that pass through Derrida's texts. For Derrida, the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy, but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way. This certain way is nothing but an ethical way, an ethos of reading and writing, an ethos of undecidability and critical responsibility. For Derrida, justice, however unpresentable it may be, doesn't wait. And this demand and call of justice is what one hears in Derrida's writing which moves between perhaps, peut-être, and should/must, il faut, being the movement of infinite revolution, movement of unconditional justice. Thus, Axel Honneth was right when he argued that Derrida's voice was constitutive for the idea of justice (Gerechtigkeit). This is what Jean-Luc Nancy affirmed by saying about his friend: speaking well and speaking the good: speaking well the good.

Ville Lähde: On the Unity of Environmental Philosophy. Does environmental philosophy form a unified discipline? Such a question might seem trivial, as environmentalist notions have become an accepted part of public life. A multitude of environmental problems have been politicised and subsumed under the umbrella of a diverse political movement. This familiarity is however deceiving. If we look under the surface of adopted political rhetoric, it seems that environmental philosophy lacks fundamental unifying features. In this article I explore various candidates for unity and demonstrate that environmental philosophy doesn't even have a common object of inquiry. But I claim that this is troublesome only if we stick with the notion of unity. By leaving it behind we can understand environmental problems better and bring environmental philosophy close to practice.

Kai Eriksson: On Cybernetics. After World War II, a new communicative whole began to take shape as a result of an intertwining of several theoretical discourses, technological inventions, institutional organizations, and political ends and practices. Norbert Wiener laid perhaps the most important part of the theoretical foundation for a new communicative constellation. The theories formulated by Wiener, independently and with Claude E. Shannon, constituted a unifying conceptual terrain within which questions of control, whether as practices of business management or national discourses on political governance, could be posed in terms of communication. Now, the cybernetic technology of governance that established an immanent mechanism between communication and control seemed to be applicable, for the first time, to managerial problems in general, not only to those in some limited expert systems. Although society certainly did not change into an automatic machine based on formal rules, the extent of how the idea of this kind of machine shaped social thinking cannot

Summaries 3/05

Mika Ojakangas: Friedrich Nietzsche's "Bad Conscience": A Genealogy. The article argues that Nietzsche's concept "bad conscience", just like his whole view of Christianity, derives from Lutheran theology in general and Martin Luther's writings in particular. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche argues that Christianity is characterized by a will to bad conscience. However, the history of the concept of conscience reveals that neither in St Paul nor in the Scholastics one can find such a will. In fact, Paul purifies the concept of conscience (syneidesis) from the negative connotations that this concept had in Hellenistic literature - even from the connotations the authors of the classical period gave to the verbal root of the syneidesis, that is to say, to emauto synoida ("I know with myself"). For Paul, conscience ceases to be a mere punishing instance (comp. erinyes) or a judge (kategoros) and becomes an impartial witness (martyros). For the Scholastics, in turn, the conscience is that aspect of the Aristotelian practical reason (phronesis) issuing judgments about what specific action should be performed in a given situation in the light of acknowledged divine law. In both of these cases, the will to bad conscience is lacking. It is only in Luther that one can find such a will, which is why, in the end of the article, light is brought into some aspects of Nietzsche's Lutheran background.

Janne Kylliäinen: Kierkegaard's (Anti)- Political Thought. Kierkegaard sees his age as an age of reflection that is oriented towards the ideals of equality and freedom, but characterised by a sickness in spirit. There is a discrepancy between lofty ideals and concrete actuality. As a result human relationships are dissolving and the society is falling apart. Kierkegaard's remedy is an ethical-religious reformation of society. Individuals should begin from themselves and actualise the ideals of freedom and equality in their own personal existence. - The alleged subjectivism of Kierkegaard may be regarded as a self-conscious dialectical move in the historical development of society: the ethical-religious individual is the cure against the atomisation of society.for works.

Pasi Väliaho: Diaphanes - the image, event, truth. This article explores ontological modalities of the image, starting from Aristotle's notion of diaphanes - a medium that lets the world appear in actuality as light, and simultaneously retains its potential existence as darkness or the formless. This basic notion generates two perspectives on the image. First, following Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze, the image is to be approached not in terms of representation or resemblance but as an "autopoietic" event structuring the way in which the world appears to us. Secondly, through its potentialities, its virtual idea, the image fundamentally connects with our capacity to think and consider something as true.

Summaries 4/05

Tiina Arppe: Rousseau and Durkheim. Sociology, passions and evil. One of the central questions in sociology has been the role of affectivity in human social life. There seems to be something irrational (the affectional) in the very core of society, even though sociologists such as Durkheim did their best to keep the subject matter and methodology of scientific sociology strictly non-psychological. This article discusses the theoretical relations of Rousseau and Durkheim as well as their views of the role of passions in the birth of the society.

Risto Eräsaari: The passive fantasy of unfulfilled spaces. Tracing Robert Musil's concept of contingency. For the most part the concept of contingency has been understood as chance, opportunity, alternative, latitude or creation based on awareness that is neither necessary nor impossible, neither inevitable nor unthinkable. It is not difficult to accept the view that the contingency of modern society in the 20th century presents a valid truth. It is however difficult to get hold of the conceptual frame of this analysis, namely the contingency theorem itself. This essay has picked up Robert Musil's unfinished "Man Without Qualities". It tries to trace the ways in which the reality of undetermination is recognized, and how the idea of contingency, latitude and new possibilities become its conducting concepts. Musil's contingency represents one way of clarifying the contingency theorem.