SUMMARIES 1/2007

PANU RAATIKAINEN: Evolutionary Psy­cho­­logy and its Problems. The standard claims of evolutionary psychology on the alleged innate mechanisms of the human mind are reviewed and critically dis­cus­sed. It is argued that the principal theses of evolutio­nary psychology are insufficiently support­­ed by empirical facts, and are based on problematic reasoning and oversimplified understanding of the evolutionary the­ory. These claims have not in fact passed the critical discussion of the scientific community, and do not thus constitute genuine scientific knowledge.

JAKKE HOLVAS: In-debting/To in-debt and pay in Christian Morality. Friedrich Niet­zsche as a Critic of Metaphysical Eco­nomy. In Zur Ge­nealogie der Moral Fried­rich Niet­zsche suggests that morals should be exa­mined as a relationship between a creditor and a debtor. An individual is a subject who pays his debt to the community, ancestors and God. According to Niet­zsche a moral Christian gets into debt when he is made to believe in guilty conscience, the concept of sin and free will. He has pangs of conscience and pays his debt by either treating others badly (pay back) or by treating himself badly (remorse). Contrary to Christian mo­rals by which one pays back in a cruel, unconsci­ous and secret manner, archaic ethics rely on ceremonial rules, refined respect and benevolence.

SUMMARIES 2/2007

ALAIN EHRENBERG: The Weariness of Becoming Oneself. A Sociohistorical Perspective on Depression. In the 1940's, depression was merely a syndrome recognizable in most mental illnesses, and socie­ty paid it no particular attention. Today, this disorder has captured the attention of psychiatry, just as psychosis did fifty years ago. This is the medical success of depression. At the same time, the media treats depression as the latest fashion, as the scourge of the century. Depression has been transformed into a practical tool for defining various kinds of unhappiness and alleviating them by multiple means. This is the social success of depression. The aim of this article is to explain this double success, the medical one being embedded in the social, in answering two intertwined questions: Firstly, how has depression imposed itself as our main form of personal unhappiness? Secondly, to what extent and in what way does depression reveal the transformations of sociality?

ILPO HELÉN: Depression in Great Numbers. Epidemiological Equipment and the Metamorphosis of Psychiatry. The subject of the paper is the becoming of depression a major public health problem in Finland from the late 1980s onwards. In particular, the role of ‘epidemiological turn' in psychiatry in facilitating this process is analysed. The main argument of the paper is following: Epidemiological studies have brought symptoms and risks of depression into the focus of psychiatric reasoning and practice. This shift is parallel with the vast expansion of the scope of mental disorders, especially depression, during the past quarter of a century. Consequent­ly, a great part of mental health care has changed from a therapeutic practice to risk management and control of personal living.

LOTTA HAUTAMÄKI: Anyone's depression. The article analyses the problem of depression as it is manifested in Finnish depression guidance texts directed to laymen. Drawing from Ian Hacking's and Michel Foucault's thinking, the article ana­lyses the technologies of the self that "ma­ke up" people: mould the possibilities to ponder everyday feelings, conduct and actions as regards to the possibility of depression. The cornerstone of depression guidance and counselling is the logic of standardised disease classifications (ICD and DSM). This logic is seen as a mediating and assembling concept, intertwining different forms of medical knowledge, policies of the welfare state, and ethics as ways to govern one's own life, that all shape the way depression is understood and articulated.

SARA HEINÄMAA: Belief and Trust. Two Interpretations of the Concept of Protodoxa. This article offers two different interpretations of the concept of protodoxa or primordial faith as used by Husserl and Mer­leau-Ponty: a cognitivistic interpretation and an existential interpretation. It argues that Merleau-Ponty's understanding of our primary relation to reality is influenced by Husserl's late manuscripts, on the one hand, and by Kierkegaard's discussion of religious faith, on the other hand. For Merleau-Ponty, primoridal faith is not a propositional attitude, belief or judgment but an affective sensory relation that we have to the perceivable world. The paper ends in a description of the basic structures of the world encountered in this fundamental attitude or relation. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is not a set of objects but a texture of affective qualities.

SUMMARIES 3/2007

Sara Heinämaa: Sensory Foundations of Perception and the Philosophical Tasks of the Arts. In his two well-known essays on visual arts, Cézanne's Doubt (1945) and The Eye and the Mind (1961), Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that art has a philosophical task in the radically critical inspection of perception and its foundations. This article explicates Merleau-Ponty's argument and its phe­no­me­no­logical starting point in Husserl's concept of feeling as inseparably intertwined with sensation. Mo­reover the article develops Merleau-Ponty's idea of art and its philosophical task further by discussing how the other arts - literature, music and dance - relate to perception and sensation. In particular, the paper argues that dance art has a philosophical role in the investigation of the foundations of perception in kinaesthetic and tactile sensations.

Miika Luoto: Imagination, schema and fi­ni­tu­de. On Heidegger's interpretation of Kant. The Kan­tian conception of the two sources of human kno­wledge: sensible intuition and conceptual un­der­standing, implies a new notion of finitude. In or­der to reveal the constitutive role of the problem of finitude in the Critique of Pure Reason, Hei­deg­ger's interpretation of Kant presented in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics focuses on the fun­c­ti­on of imagination as the "middle" between the sen­sible and the concept. The present paper attempts to give an account of the originary character of finitude as it takes place in "sche­matism", the very operation of imagination for Kant. The concept of transcendental schema, conceived as "pure ima­ge", is shown to be his way of addressing the on­tological creativity of the finite - and that means: on­tically non-creative - human being. The paper con­cludes with noting the crucial importan­ce, beyond Kant's original insight, of the pheno­meno­logical problem of finitude for the question of human existence in its temporal-historical character.

JOONA TAIPALE: Remarks on the phenomenolo­gy of image consciousness. According to Husserl, image consciousness has a structure that distingui­s­hes it not only from positional acts (such as perception and memory) but also from all non-po­si­tional acts. In regard to positionality, image con­sci­ousness has a complex structure. Unlike straight­forward perception, image consciousness does not posit the material picture on the wall as such, but is rather preoccupied with the theme. On the other hand, the theme is not posited either - we are aware of it precisely as pictured. According to Husserl, this is due to a third element: consciousness of the apparent image (figure, shape, contrasts etc.) that depicts the theme of the picture. According to Husserl, the non-objective presence of this mediating element sharply distinguishes image consciousness from imagination.

Timo Kalanti: Of Performability of Objects: Material Means as Producers of Body Techniques. The article discusses body techniques in relation to material means of bodily action. There is a common presupposition that bodily skills can only be learned by practicing them in action. But what is it in action that teaches you to act? A material object responding to bodily actions according to its intrinsic features. The responsiveness of an object informs the body to correct its technique. The body registers behaviour of an object via its somatosensory system producing a representation of an object as a feel for an instrument. Knowing by feeling is embodied sensual knowledge preceding any linguistic formulations. Ontological rea­lism renders possible the capability of objects to resist and return the forces the body channels to them. The notion of inscription, defined in Akrich's and La­tour's sociology of artefacts as a program of action materialised in an object, seems to have a more solid foundation in ontological realism than in the relational ontology of actor-network theory.

OLLI PYYHTINEN & SAKARI TAMMINEN: Human, All Too Human? Foucault, Latour, and the Anthropological Sleep of the Human Sciences. Michel Fou­cault's thought has been to some extent transmitted to and continued by the work of his fellow countryman Bruno Latour. However, so far their oeuvres have been scrutinized very little next to each other in the secondary literature. In this article, we explore their relation in connection with the project to re-think the established constitution of the human and social sciences. This project is discussed in detail on three points of encounter: it starts with the question of Man, which then leads into dealing with the materiality of thought, and finally into examining the articulations between the social and the material. It is shown, first, that for both Foucault and Latour, the human is always connected to its "outside" and therefore cannot be regarded as being constitutive in itself. Secondly, we argue that while both emphasize the dispersion and materiality of thought, it is only Latour's work which offers us a plausible understanding of materiality itself. Thirdly, it is claimed that while both examine the articulations of the social and the material as events produced in struggles and confrontations, the scale of their examination is different: whereas Foucault's work helps us to grasp large wholes and long historical descents, the Latourian sociology of me­diations is better equipped for studying the local assembling of networks. All in all, Foucault's and Latour's perspectives prove to be mutually complementary. That is, even though they do not necessarily stand in any immediate connection with one another, both perspectives can be of use together: where the scope of either of them is insufficient, the other is most often there to complete it.

SUMMARIES 4/2007

Sami Pihlström: Emergence, Pragmatic Realism, and Non-Reductive Naturalism. The concept of emergen­ce is hotly debated in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. The contributions by philosophers associated with the pragmatist tradition are, however, usually neglected in mainstream analytic discussions of emergence. After introducing some the key characteristics of emergence, as traditionally understood, this paper suggests that a richer perspective on this concept can be opened through a reconsideration of pragmatist (e.g., Deweyan) articulations of emergent, non-reductive naturalism. The assumption of metaphysical realism, more or less taken for granted by most contemporary emergentists and their critics alike, must be questioned from a pragmatist point of view.

Panu Raatikainen: Reductionism, Downward Causation, and Emergen­ce. The historical background of the notion of emergence is first brief­ly­ reviewed, and the notion of emergence is then more systematically ana­lyzed. The question of emergence is next discussed particularly in the field of the philosophy of mind. The problem of mental causation is considered by taking into account some recent developments in the philosophy of science. The problem is viewed from the perspective of the new interventionist theory of causation developed by Woodward. It is argued that mental causation is much less a problem than it has appeared to be.

Jaakko Kuorikoski & Petri Yli­kos­ki: Emergence: From a Mystery to a Research Problem. This paper shows that current philosophical accounts of emergence in philosophy of mind are based on outdated and inadequate conceptions of explanation, reduction and causality. We argue that the debates in philosophy of mind suffer also from some other methodo­logical defects. We propose that William Wimsatts theory of emergence as non-agg­regativity provides a fruitful replacement for earlier notions of emergence. This account can be used to articulate different kinds of organizational dependence and it connects the concept of emergence to pro­perties of reductionistic research heuristics used in scientific research.

Matias Murole: The Intertwinement of the Concept of Responsibility and the Problem of Free Will. In this essay the close connection between the concept of responsibility and the metaphysical problem of free will is examined in historical perspective. It will be shown that the abstract concept of responsibility - which unifies the practices of praise and blame - and the problem of free will are excplicated for the first time at different times in history. Accordingly it is suggested that the connection of responsibility and free will problem should be treated as two separate - all­though tightly entangled - questions rather than two sides of the same question.