Arto Laitinen – författare

This unique collection focuses on Hegel's Philosophy of Action as it relates to current concerns. Including key papers by Taylor, MacIntyre, and McDowell as well as eleven especially commissioned contributions, it aims to readdress the dialogue between Hegel and contemporary philosophy of action.

This book brings together philosophers, social psychologists and social scientists to approach contemporary social reality from the viewpoint of solidarity. It examines the nature of different kinds of solidarity and assesses the normative and explanatory potential of the concept. Various aspects of solidarity as a special emotionally and ethically responsive relation are studied: the nature of collective emotions and mutual recognition, responsiveness to others’ suffering and needs, and the nature of moral partiality included in solidarity. The evolution of norms of solidarity is examined both via the natural evolution of the human “social brain” and via the institutional changes in legal constitutions and contemporary work life. This text will appeal to students, scholars, and anyone interested in the interdisciplinary topic of social solidarity.

This unique collection focuses on Hegel's Philosophy of Action as it relates to current concerns. Including key papers by Taylor, MacIntyre, and McDowell as well as eleven especially commissioned contributions, it aims to readdress the dialogue between Hegel and contemporary philosophy of action.

This book provides a thorough analysis of the notion of social wrong and the idea of social pathology. It addresses questions such as: What does it mean for something to be socially wrong? Why do social philosophers keep “diagnosing” wrongs as “social pathologies”? And is something a pathology because it is wrong, or is it rather a wrong because it is pathological? By constructing an analytical framework of social wrongs and developing the idea of wrongness-with, the book seeks to support critical social thought. While taking societal and structural injustices seriously as paradigm cases of social wrongs, it also offers a comprehensive elaboration of social pathologies as social wrongs. It provides a map of four conceptions of social pathology and contends that only one of them, organicism, must be completely rejected, while the other views may contribute to a critical understanding of social reality. It further elaborates a “natural-historical” view according to which social pathologies as well as their diagnosis and cure are part and parcel of social life. It tests the usefulness of this conception by examining diagnoses of contemporary capitalism in terms of metabolic rift, economic compulsion, and capitalist cannibalization. These diagnoses exemplify three types of pathologies of social life: pathologies of reproduction, pathologies of transformation, and pathologies of mediating the reproductive and transformative pressures of social life.

Charles Taylor (1931- ) is one of the leading living philosophers. This is the first extended study on the key notions of his views in philosophical anthropology and ethical theory. Firstly, Laitinen clarifies, qualifies and defends Taylor's thesis that transcendental arguments show that personal understandings concerning ethical and other values (so called "strong evaluation") is necessary, in different ways, for human agency, selfhood, identity and personhood. Secondly, Laitinen defends and develops in various ways Taylor's value realism. Finally, the book criticizes Taylor's view that it is necessary to identify and locate a constitutive source of value, such as God, Nature or Human Reason. Taylor relies heavily on this claim in his accounts of moral life, modern identity and, most recently, secularisation. Laitinen argues that the whole notion of constitutive moral source should be dropped – Taylor's views concerning strong evaluation and value realism are distorted by the question of constitutive "moral sources".