SUMMARIES 1/2008

STEPHEN COLLIER: From "Uninsurable risk" to New Security Assemblages. This article examines "enactment" as a significant new form of knowledge about collective life that differs fundamentally from familiar forms of "social" knowledge. The emergence of enactment is traced through a series of domains where the problem of estimating the likelihood and consequence of potentially catastrophic future events has been made an explicit object of expert reflection: response to a possible nuclear attack in U.S. civil defense planning in the late 1940s; the emergence of natural hazard modelling in the 1960s and 1970s; and the emergence today of terrorism risk assessment and its proposed application to federal budgetary distributions. The article engages with central questions in debates around "risk society" and insurance, holding that new approaches to understanding and assessing risk are not merely idiosyncratic or subjective. Rather, they should be treated as coherent new forms of knowledge and practice whose genealogy and present assemblies must be traced.

JYRI LIUKKO: François Ewald, insurance and the liberal destiny of solidarity. This article examines the historical relationship between (social) insurance and solidarity through the work of François Ewald. The main part of the article focuses on Ewald's interpretation of the emergence of insurance society and the related shift from the liberal diagram of responsibility (civil law) to social solidarity (social law). The purpose is to problematise Ewald's division between the paradigm of responsibility and the paradigm of solidarity in the context of insurance. The starting point is that "liberal" and "social" forms of government are not contradictory but fundamentally interrelated. After analysing Ewald's reasoning the article examines the possibility to think responsibility and solidarity as parallel diagrams of government. In the end the relationship between insurance and solidarity is discussed through some current questions related to insurance.

ANTTI SILVAST & MIKKO J. VIRTANEN: The risk, the expertice and the lay people. A Critique of Ulrich Beck's theory of risk society. The notion of risk has become an essential part of almost any description of the contemporary times. For sociologists, society has been a "risk society" ever since the publication of the Risikogesellschaft by Ulrich Beck in 1986. This article discusses theoretical and empirical issues in Beck's writings. To this end we use data on the management of electricity distribution failures by experts and lay people. We will also consider the use of the concept of risk by Beck. While we admit that Beck's work suffers from overstatements, we claim that his ideas on the systemic emergence of more pluralistic institutional decision-making are useful for future research.

SUMMARIES 2/2008

PETTER KORKMAN: Reason as a key to ethics: comparing key passages in Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Hobbes. Natural law is traditionally thought of as a rationalist discourse. In this article I strive to gauge the sense and scope of such rationalism in two key fragments of text taken from St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Hobbes. My conclusion, which forms a starting point for further research, is to suggest that we live today with two contrasting and to some extent incompatible concepts of the role of reason in moral life: a classical one where reason can develop into wisdom as a deepening moral understanding and a modern one that is explicitly emptied of all moral contents.

TIMO PANKAKOSKI: Politics as struggle. Max Weber's triple Kampf. The article stu­dies the idea of politics as struggle, battle or conflict (Kampf) in Max Weber. By means of conceptual and historical analysis, it shows that there are three distinct ways in which Weber speaks of politics as Kampf: abstract and existential value conflict, active and intentional struggle of individuals against the aims of others and, finally, quasi-Darwinian latent struggle for selection. All of these distinct senses are necessary for understanding Weber. As a result of this manifoldness and some dubious ideological connections of the idea, the applicability of Weberian political conflict in contemporary debates becomes questionable.

SUMMARIES 3/2008

MIIRA TUOMINEN: Aristotle on the Varieties of Life. In recent scholarly literature, Aristotle's claim that life is said in many ways has been analysed in terms of his notion of core-dependent homonymy. This means that the various definitions of what it is for different kinds of living things to be living must be related to some one thing that is prior to the other forms of life. The main part of this article concentrates on a critical analysis of the interpretations made by Gareth Matthews and Christopher Shiel­ds. Towards the end, a new suggestion is proposed. In the Metaphysics, the unmoved mover, an Aristotelian god and an eternal thinker, is identified as being the highest living thing. This implies that the highest and best definition of life consists in being divine and eternal. Aristotle points out that all sub-lunar living things (animals and plants) are living to the extent that they take part in eternity and divinity, i.e., the eternal cycle of living, where one individual of a certain kind is succeeded by another. This indicates that the core of life consists of eternity and divinity.

SIRKKU IKONEN: Early 20th century German philosophy of life. Today the term philosophy of life is usually used to refer to personal attitude to life, not to a movement of philosophy. However, in the beginning of the 20th century and especially during the Weimar republic philosophy of life, Lebensphilosophie, was the most influential philosophical trend in German-speaking world. This article draws an outline of Le­bens­philosophie and explores its ba­sic themes of anti-scienticism, intuition and lived experience, Erlebnis. It is also discussed how these themes were intertwined in the Wei­mar culture.

SUSANNA LINDBERG: Elemental Politics? Hans Jonas and Jacques Derrida on Responsibility Towards Nature. Is there a politics that can deal with the elemental ground of the lifeworld ? I explore this question by comparing two propositions for a politics of nature / animality. Hans Jonas and Jacques Derrida share 1) a critique of Heidegger's Dasein in the name of " life " 2) a question of responsibility towards non-human beings and 3) a thinking of politics in terms of future. But while Jonas defends "an authentically human li­fe", Derrida doubts all discourses of an authentic humanity and seeks to give a place in the community to (artificial, fictional) animality. Jonas doubts whether democracy can carry the responsibility of future life. Derrida, on the contrary, defines democracy as the possible coming of any kind of living beings. Nevertheless, both speak in terms of living beings and neither extends the sphere of politics to englobe the elemental ground of lifeworld.

YRJÖ HAILA: The Temporalities of Life. Life on Earth is an historical phenomenon; ori­ginally, there was no life; now life exists; in the future, life will vanish. However, it would be misleading to consider the existence of life on Earth as a unified process. Life is a plurality, and the stabilisation and continuity of key processes have given structure to the evolution of life. From the perspective of physics, time is simultaneity made real by a material signal. Simultanei­ty is essential for the temporality of life as well, and the key issue is synchronization of different cyclic processes of renewal and reproduction in the physiology of single organisms, and through interactions between different organisms. As the characteristic time-scales of key processes vary, life exists in many temporalities.

SUMMARIES 4/2008

Ville Lähde: Why study Rousseau's conceptions of nature? For some reason Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is remembered as a philosopher of nature, even as a forerunner of environmentalist sentiments, even though nature or environment in the dominant sense of those words does not play an important part in the majority of his works. This article proposes that this perception of Rousseau hinges on the multiplicity of the meanings of the word 'nature' and the tendency to read conceptual unity behind it. An alternative perspective of interpretation is proposed, one that takes this multiplicity seriously and approaches the meanings of 'nature' from the viewpoint of language use. It can teach us not only to understand Rousseau better but also to recognize how transitions of meaning are used both in philosophical and everyday discourse.

Markku Oksanen & Anne Kumpula: Voluntariness and Compulsoriness in Conservation: Legal and Ethical Considerations. This article deals with the so-called voluntary means in nature conservation. The perspective is that of moral, political and legal theory. It focuses on the METSO programme that addresses the biodiversity conservation in private forests in Southern Finland. METSO consists of new instruments that emphasise voluntariness. In ge­neral, there are many voluntary means or instruments to be recognised, but they all share the characteristic of "soft policies" in their attempts to affect individuals' and other actors' behaviour. The article distinguishes between two kinds of voluntariness: ethical voluntariness, which means conservation from disinterested motives; and paid voluntariness in which the landowner receives compensation from the government for agreeing to forbear from certain forms of land use. The authors claim that it can undermine the general commitment to the conservationist legislation, po­licies and lifestyle.