Papers by timo airaksinen
Человек и образование, 2013
Humanities
Tragic irony may mean the dramatic irony in scripted tragedy (tragic play). The audience can pred... more Tragic irony may mean the dramatic irony in scripted tragedy (tragic play). The audience can predict the regrettable outcome on the stage before the main characters do. I focus on non-scripted events and their tragic aspects. Colloquially, disaster and tragedy are synonyms, but this is misleading. Tragedy means a disaster in special circumstances, which I suggest we can read ironically. This is to say, as I argue, tragedy is necessarily ironic. I read Richard Rorty on irony and Hegel on tragic irony and cunning of reason. My aim is to redescribe real-life conflicts by using the dialectical understanding of irony and tragedy. Following Rorty and Hegel, I apply their theories of identity to real tragedies. The validation of the theory of literary criticism is a practical matter. My key illustrations come from modern wars; wars are and cause disasters, and thus I expect we can discover cases of tragic irony in factual and counterfactual contexts. Sometimes, the losses and suffering wou...
Homo Oeconomicus, 2016
Can one simultaneously have an economic system that is both vibrant and just? And, if so, is the ... more Can one simultaneously have an economic system that is both vibrant and just? And, if so, is the current mainstream economic paradigm helping us achieve such a worthwhile goal? We argue that the notions of justice and economic vibrancy should not be discussed in isolation from one another. Also, any potential solution to this problem has to be dynamically consistent and take into the account changing nature of the world economy in which production and distribution of information and knowledge takes increasingly the center stage. This may require switching from solving mechanistic optimization problems prevalent in the main stream economics, to more complex approaches that explicitly take into the account both the role of institutional development and more complex ways in which economic decisions are actually made today.
Routledge eBooks, Jan 30, 1993
The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley, 2022
Berkeley’s theology is not a systematic set of doctrines but a collection of rather informally ex... more Berkeley’s theology is not a systematic set of doctrines but a collection of rather informally expressed views and viewpoints mainly concerning such practical questions as the reasonability of faith and human happiness in heaven. His most interesting ideas concern natural religion. He deals with these matters in his sermons and other minor writings, but also in Alciphron. An important question concerns ethics and moral virtue. To be virtuous we must obey God’s commands, but that is possible only if we have faith in him. The importance of the second condition is often underestimated because Berkeley is seen as a philosopher. The virtuous go to heaven, where their happiness is “large as our desires,” in other words, infinite eternal bliss. However, Berkeley says we know nothing of its characteristics, or what heaven is like. He even says that we need new, possibly angelic, faculties to experience it, yet we may speculate about the nature of afterlife.
The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, 2002
Theory and Decision, 1984
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1980
The Philosophical Review, 1982
The Method of Applied Logic: Some Philosophical Considerations.- Reply.- Rescher's Hypothetic... more The Method of Applied Logic: Some Philosophical Considerations.- Reply.- Rescher's Hypothetical Reasoning: An Amendment.- Reply.- Hypothetical Reasoning and Conditionals.- Reply.- Rescher's Theory of Plausible Reasoning.- Reply.- A Modal Logic of Place.- Reply.- Familiar Mental Phenomena.- Reply.- Toward a Theory of Attributes.- Reply.- Potentiality from Aristotle to Rescher and Back.- Reply.- Substances and Individual Notions.- Reply.- Utilitarianism and the Vicarious Affects.- Reply.- Rescher's Epistemological System.- Reply.- How Is Knowledge of the World Possible?.- Reply.- Rescher and Kant: Some Common Themes in Philosophy of Science.- Reply.- Nicholas Rescher: A Biographical Precis.- List of Publications by Nicholas Rescher.- Nicholas Rescher's Metabibliography.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.
European Journal of Political Economy, 1986
This paper analyses the concept of coercion, understood as a special type of social power. Coerci... more This paper analyses the concept of coercion, understood as a special type of social power. Coercion uses threats to force the victim to obey the dominating agent, that is, to elicit an intentional response from the subordinate person. The typical decision environment is described and the effect of threats on utility distributions is analysed. Some causal aspects of threats are also discussed. The strategies of coercive threats are expressed in a game theoretical form. A paradox is revealed: the coercer can only seldom make his threat convincing to his intended victim. It is difficult to show that a rational agent (the coercer) would indeed realize his threat when he meets resistence. Different coercive state policies are then discussed in relation to this paradox and a solution is suggested. Finally, Steven Lukes' ideas concerning power are criticized. A perfectly natural way of understanding coercive processes emerges once we introduce the concept of an omniscient agent, who in this case is A, into our explanatory machinery. Omniscience and some game theoretical paradoxes associated with it are studied by S.J. Brains. I shall borrow his starting point. He writes, In game theory, God's omniscience can be conceptualized as moving second in a game, with man's prior choice of strategy already known. (Brains, 1980, pp. 278-279; also Brains 1982).
Hobbes Studies, 1993
Any person is vulnerable to death and must suffer from the fear of sudden death. Thomas Hobbes bu... more Any person is vulnerable to death and must suffer from the fear of sudden death. Thomas Hobbes builds on these premises in all of his work until in Leviathan he offers his final, comprehensive, and rhetorical account of them. Because of such fears, human beings are powerless in the sense that they cannot defend themselves in the condition of nature. Instead they can be supposed to make a covenant with a sovereign power. This paper analyzes HobbesAEs notion of emotions and compares it with Descartes. Special attention is paid to the naturalistic or physiological explanation of emotions, especially to the case of aversive motivations. According to Hobbes, aversions motivate people to act, but it can also be shown that according to his own principles aversive motivation cannot motivate but makes the person passive. HobbesAEs notions of rhetoric and scientific reasoning are also taken into account.
Humanities
People harass people to defend and promote their fundamental beliefs, political ideologies, relig... more People harass people to defend and promote their fundamental beliefs, political ideologies, religious dogmas, and the Truth. They create these with marvelous lucidity and unnerving verve, spreading, guarding, and enforcing their convictions. Fanatical ideologies penetrate and pollute our life world like “lyrical leprosy”. We need a coping strategy. Conformists may want to go along and join the perpetrators, whomever they happen to be. Activists fight ideological pollution, a risky strategy. Indifference and apathy do not pollute others and are less dangerous than rebelling. Following E. M. Cioran, I discuss three defensive strategies: those of a skeptic, an idler, and an aesthete. I reject trivializing the third strategy; instead, I discuss an ironist’s options. A recommendable route to indifference is to read the Truth metaphorically and ironize it. This voids its contents, and the result is adiaphora. We can also start with irony and metaphorize it. Such linguistic–aesthetic metho...
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Papers by timo airaksinen