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47Sisäisyys ja suunnistautuminen. Inwardness and orientation. A Festchrift to Jussi Kotkavirta (edited book)SoPhi. 2014.
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37Recognition, Acknowledgement, and AcceptanceIn Heikki Ikaheimo & Arto Laitinen (eds.), Recognition and Social Ontology, Brill. pp. 309-347. 2011.In this chapter I distinguish between a) recognition of persons, b) normative acknowledgement and c) institution-creating acceptance. All of these go beyond a fourth, merely descriptive sense of the word “recognition,” namely identification or re-identification of something as something. I distinguish four aspects of "taking someone as a person": R1 A Belief that the other is a person, and can engage in agency-regarding relations.R2 Moral Opinion that the choice whether and when to engage with pe…Read more
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26This is the introductory chapter to a book. This study has two parts. The first part concerns some central concepts in philosophical anthropology and the second part some of the central questions in ethics. One of today’s leading philosophers, Charles Taylor (b. 1931), suggests with his notion of “strong evaluation” that these two areas should be studied in tandem: the self and the good are interrelated, and the nature of persons is intertwined with the nature of values.1 Strong evaluations, i.…Read more
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863Interpersonal recognition: A response to value or a precondition of personhood?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 45 (4). 2002.This article suggests first that the concept of interpersonal recognition be understood in a multidimensional (as opposed to one-dimensional), practical (as opposed to symbolic), and strict (as opposed to broad) way. Second, it is argued that due recognition be seen as a reason-governed response to evaluative features, rather than all normativity and reasons being seen as generated by recognition. This can be called a response-model, or, more precisely, a value-based model of due recognition. A …Read more
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96. Diversity and universalityIn Strong Evaluation Without Moral Sources. On Charles Taylor’s Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics, De Gruyter. pp. 217-256. 2008.Any view stressing the relevance of the engaged perspective for value realism must face the fact of diversity of moral views. There is significant intercultural diversity in people’s beliefs about values. Skeptics like Mackie argue that the diversity results from there being nothing for people to know, or at least nothing they can know. In this chapter I try to show that engaged value realism is compatible with universal, unrestricted validity of values. In 6.1 and 6.2 I discuss various possible…Read more
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125On Identity, Alienation and Consequences of September 11th. An Interview with Charles TaylorIn Arto Laitinen & Nicholas H. Smith (eds.), Perspectives on the Philosophy of Charles Taylor, Acta Philosophica Fennica. pp. 165-195. 2002.HR/AL: Professor Taylor, what are you working on these days? CT: Well, several things. One of the things I am working on is something I was lecturing this fall at the New School University, and that I have called ‘modern social imaginaries’. It is an attempt to understand western modernity in terms of the different ways in which people imagine their social existence. These imaginaries are a condition for new kinds of practices that are characteristic of modernity. This research is an internal pa…Read more
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803Recognition and Social Ontology: An IntroductionIn Heikki Ikaheimo & Arto Laitinen (eds.), Recognition and Social Ontology, Brill. pp. 1-24. 2011.A substantial article length introduction to a collection on social ontology and mutual recognition.
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311Beyond Communication. A Critical Study of Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy, written by Jean-Philippe Deranty (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 12 (5): 664-667. 2015.
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178Social Equality, Recognition, and Preconditions of Good LifeIn Michael Fine, Paul Henman & Nicholas Smith (eds.), Social Inequality Today, . 2003.In this paper I analyze interpersonal and institutional recognition and discuss the relation of different types of recognition to various principles of social justice (egalitarianism, meritarianism, legitimate favouritism, principles of need and free exchange). Further, I try to characterize contours of good autonomous life, and ask what kind of preconditions it has. I will distinguish between five kinds of preconditions: psychological, material, cultural, intersubjective and institutional. Afte…Read more
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1027Today and tomorrow: Review of Charles Taylor by Ruth Abbey (review)Radical Philosophy 30 108. 2001.The Philosophy Now series promises to combine rigorous analysis with authoritative expositions. Ruth Abbey’s book lives up to this demand by being a clear, reliable and more than up-to-date introduction to Charles Taylor ’s philosophy. Although it is an introductory book, the amount of footnotes and references ought to please those who want to study the original texts more closely. Abbey’s book is structured thematically: morality, selfhood, politics and epistemology get 50 pages each. The focus…Read more
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47SolidarityIn Byron Kaldis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Sage Publications. pp. 948-950. 2013.An encyclopedia entry on "solidarity". Around the 1840’s the term was adopted in German and English, and was politicized, adopted to social sciences, and came to be used in a broader meaning of emotionally and normatively motivated readiness for mutual support, as in the slogan “one for all and all for one”. In rival meanings, the concept has been used in four main contexts: first, in the context of explaining or understanding the nature of social cohesion, social order, ‘groupness’ or the ‘glue…Read more
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17In this chapter I pursue the connection between humans as strong evaluators and humans as strongly valued. The connection is, quite simply, that strong evaluators are valued because they are strong evaluators. Yet, this valuing is of two kinds: someone’s achievements as a strong evaluator can be esteemed, or he can be respected as a person. Personhood is a specific kind of moral status, but it is based on personhood in the descriptive sense. Taylor’s views on persons can be seen as trying to inc…Read more
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27Practices as ‘actual’ sources of goodness of actionsPhilosophy and Public Issues - Filosofia E Questioni Pubbliche 57-70. 2015.This is a contribution to a special issue of "Philosophy and Public Issues" focussing on Michael Thompson's Life and Action. I first discuss the nature of actuality, then the distinction between acting on a first-order consideration and a second-order consideration, and the possibly related distinction between expressing a practice and merely simulating it. Then I turn to the topic of varieties of goodness.
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72. Human agents as strong evaluatorsIn Strong Evaluation Without Moral Sources. On Charles Taylor’s Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics, De Gruyter. pp. 61-105. 2008.In this chapter I discuss Taylor’s claim that strong evaluation is inevitable for human agency: without a framework of strong evaluations human agents would be in a crisis which Taylor calls, perhaps misleadingly, “an identity crisis”. With a broad brush I introduce some of the essential background in first three sections, and scrutinize the inevitability of strong evaluation more closely in the last three sections. I introduce first the distinction between the engaged perspective, which in Tayl…Read more
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31Group Minds and the Problem of the First BeliefBalkan Journal of Philosophy 2014 (1): 43-48. 2014.ABSTRACT. This article presents theories of group belief with a problem. It is conceptually and psychologically impossible for there to be a believer with just one belief. For conceptual reasons, a single belief could not have any content without the background of other beliefs. Or even if it could, it would for psychological reasons be impossible for the believer to know or understand the content of its sole belief. With certain plausible assumptions, however, groups would at some point of ti…Read more
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462Charles Taylor, a secular age (review)Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (3): 353-355. 2010.Charles Taylor has written three big books on the self-understandings of modern age andmodern individuals. Hegel (1975) focused on one towering figure, and held that Hegel ’ saspirations to overcome modern dualisms are still ours, but Hegelian philosophicalspeculation is not the way to do it. Sources of the Self (1989) ran the intellectual historyfrom peak to peak, stressing the continuous presence of modern tensions and cross- pressures between Enlightenment and Romanticism. A Secular Age (2…Read more
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447Recognition and Social Ontology (edited book)Brill. 2011.This unique collection examines the connections between two complementary approaches to philosophical social theory: Hegel-inspired theories of recognition, and analytical social ontology.
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502Paul Ricoeur's Surprising Take on RecognitionÉtudes Ricoeuriennes / Ricoeur Studies 2 (1): 35-50. 2011.This essay examines Paul Ricœur’s views on recognition in his book The Course of Recognition . It highlights those aspects that are in some sense surprising, in relation to his previous publications and the general debates on Hegelian Anerkennung and the politics of recognition. After an overview of Ricœur’s book, the paper examines the meaning of “recognition” in Ricœur’s own proposal, in the dictionaries Ricœur uses, and in the contemporary debates. Then it takes a closer look at the ideas of …Read more
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39Social Pathologies, Reflexive Pathologies, and the Idea of Higher-Order DisordersStudies in Social and Political Thought 25 44-65. 2015.This paper critically examines Christopher Zurn’s suggestion mentioned above that various social pathologies (pathologies of ideological recognition, maldistribution, invisibilization, rationality distortions, reification and institutionally forced self-realization) share the structure of being ‘second-order disorders’: that is, that they each entail ‘constitutive disconnects between first-order contents and secondorder reflexive comprehension of those contents, where those disconnects are perva…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |