Confronting Confucian Understandings of the Christian Doctrine of Salvation : A systematic theological analysis of the basic problems in the Confucian-Christian dialogue

The aim of the present study is to analyze Confucian understandings of the Christian doctrine of salvation in order to find the basic problems in the Confucian-Christian dialogue. I will approach the task via a systematic theological analysis of four issues in order to limit the thesis to an appropriate size. They are analyzed in three chapters as follows: 1. The Confucian concept concerning the existence of God. Here I discuss mainly the issue of assimilation of the Christian concept of God to the concepts of Sovereign on High (Shangdi) and Heaven (Tian) in Confucianism. 2. The Confucian understanding of the object of salvation and its status in Christianity. 3. The Confucian understanding of the means of salvation in Christianity. Before beginning this analysis it is necessary to clarify the vast variety of controversies, arguments, ideas, opinions and comments expressed in the name of Confucianism; thus, clear distinctions among different schools of Confucianism are given in chapter 2. In the last chapter I will discuss the results of my research in this study by pointing out the basic problems that will appear in the analysis. The results of the present study provide conclusions in three related areas: the tacit differences in the ways of thinking between Confucians and Christians, the basic problems of the Confucian-Christian dialogue, and the affirmative elements in the dialogue. In addition to a summary, a bibliography and an index, there are also eight appendices, where I have introduced important background information for readers to understand the present study.

Notions of Nation : A Critical Discursive Psychology perspective on the Isle of Man

At the the heart of this study can be seen the dual concern of how the nation is represented as a categorical entity and how this is put to use in everyday social interactions.This can be seen as a reaction to the general approach to categorisation and identity functions that tend to be reified and essentialized within the social sciences. The empirical focus of this study is the Isle of Man, a crown dependency situated geographically central within the British Isles while remaining political outside the United Kingdom. The choice of this site was chosen explicitly as ‘notions of nation’ expressed on the island can be seen as being contested and ephemerally unstable. To get at these ‘notions of nation’ is was necessary to choose specific theoretical tools that were able to capture the wider cultural and representational domain while being capable of addressing the nuanced and functional aspects of interaction. As such, the main theoretical perspective used within this study was that of critical discursive psychology which incorporates the specific theoretical tools interpretative repertoires, ideological dilemmas and subject positions. To supplement these tools, a discursive approach to place was taken in tandem to address the form and function of place attached to nationhood. Two methods of data collection were utilized, that of computer mediated communication and acquaintance interviews. From the data a number of interpretative repertoires were proposed, namely being, essential rights, economic worth, heritage claims, conflict orientation, people-as-nation and place-as-nation. Attached to such interpretative repertoires were the ideological dilemmas region vs. country, people vs. place and individualism vs. collectivism. The subject positions found are much more difficult to condense, but the most significant ones were gender, age and parentage. The final focus of the study, that of place, was shown to be more than just an unreflected on ‘container’ of people but was significant in terms of the rhetorical construction of such places for how people saw themselves and the discursive function of the particular interaction. As such, certain forms of place construction included size, community, temporal, economic, safety, political and recognition. A number of conclusions were drawn from the above which included, that when looking at nation categories we should take into account the specific meanings that people attach to such concepts and to be aware of the particular uses they are put to in interaction. Also, that it is impossible to separate concepts neatly, but it is necessary to be aware of the intersection where concepts cross, and clash, when looking at nationhood.

Reacting to Complex Threats – the Securitization in the Speeches of Anders Fogh Rasmussen based on NATO´s New Strategic Concept

The purpose of this master´s thesis is to analyze how NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen is trying to justify the existence of the military alliance through the use of security arguments. I am puzzled by the question: why does NATO still exist – what is NATO’s raison d'être. The New Strategic Concept (2010) forms the base for his argumentation. This thesis focuses on the security argumentation of NATO which is examined by analyzing the speeches the Secretary General. The theoretical framework of this study is based on constructivist approach to international security examining the linguistic process of securitization. Issues become securitized after Anders Fogh Rasmussen names them as threats. This thesis focuses on the securitization process relating to NATO and analyses what issues Rasmussen raises to the security agenda. Research data consists of the speeches by Anders Fogh Rasmussen. They are analyzed through J.L. Austin’s speech act taxonomy and Chaïm Perelman’s argumentation theories. The thesis will concentrate on the formulation and articulation of these threats which are considered and coined as “new threats” in contemporary international relations. I am conducting this research through the use of securitization theory. This study illustrates that the threats are constructed by NATO’s member-states in unison, but the resolutions are sounded through Rasmussen’s official speeches and transcripts. . Based on the analysis it can be concluded that Rasmussen is giving reasons for the existence of NATO. This takes place by making use of speech acts and different rhetorical techniques. The results of the analysis indicate that NATO remains an essential organization for the West and the rest of the world according to the Secretary General.

Grammar and disciplinary culture : a corpus-based study

The present study provides a usage-based account of how three grammatical structures, declarative content clauses, interrogative content clause and as-predicative constructions, are used in academic research articles. These structures may be used in both knowledge claims and citations, and they often express evaluative meanings. Using the methodology of quantitative corpus linguistics, I investigate how the culture of the academic discipline influences the way in which these constructions are used in research articles. The study compares the rates of occurrence of these grammatical structures and investigates their co-occurrence patterns in articles representing four different disciplines (medicine, physics, law, and literary criticism). The analysis is based on a purpose-built 2-million-word corpus, which has been part-of-speech tagged. The analysis demonstrates that the use of these grammatical structures varies between disciplines, and further shows that the differences observed in the corpus data are linked with differences in the nature of knowledge and the patterns of enquiry. The constructions in focus tend to be more frequently used in the soft disciplines, law and literary criticism, where their co-occurrence patterns are also more varied. This reflects both the greater variety of topics discussed in these disciplines, and the higher frequency of references to statements made by other researchers. Knowledge-building in the soft fields normally requires a careful contextualisation of the arguments, giving rise to statements reporting earlier research employing the constructions in focus. In contrast, knowledgebuilding in the hard fields is typically a cumulative process, based on agreed-upon methods of analysis. This characteristic is reflected in the structure and contents of research reports, which offer fewer opportunities for using these constructions.

Hyvinvointivaltion pelastamisella huonosti voivia eläkeläisiä? – mediakeskustelua vuoden 2009 eläkeiän nostopäätöksestä

This thesis examines the media debate on pensions. The case analysed in the thesis is the debate that sharpened after the Finnish government made the decision to raise the retirement age. The analysed data consists of articles published in the printed media during one month after the decision was made on 24th of February in 2009. The aim of the study is to describe how the decision is argued about by different positions of speakers and how retirement is justified from the perspective of the individual. Furthermore, the purpose is to discover different ways of discussing the pensioner. The theoretical frame for this study is social constructivism, which understands reality as socially constructed with language. From this perspective, media texts can be seen as one form of shaping reality. The data is analysed by using different methods. Thematisation is used to discover the key topics, and quantification is used to examine the prevalence of different arguments. The method in which the speaker’s ways of speaking is analysed in different participant categories I call “a speaker position analysis”. The debate around the decision to raise the retirement age highlight the power struggle both between the government and the opposition as well as the government and employee unions. One thing all discussants agree is the need to raise the retirement age. From the individual's perspective, retirement is justified mostly with hard working conditions and inadequacy of health. The pensioner's image is appearing gloomy in most discourses. Prevailing discourses are seeing a pensioner either sick and tired or someone who is not good for work and has lost his dignity. The debate around the decision is intertwined around the concepts of welfare state and individual's well-being. In the postmodern society, human preferences are individualised. Welfare state means different things to different people, as well as the individual's subjective perception of well-being is unique. These two aspects are the ones which raise the tension in the analysed media debate.

Language universals and linguistic complexity : Three case studies in core argument marking

In this dissertation I study language complexity from a typological perspective. Since the structuralist era, it has been assumed that local complexity differences in languages are balanced out in cross-linguistic comparisons and that complexity is not affected by the geopolitical or sociocultural aspects of the speech community. However, these assumptions have seldom been studied systematically from a typological point of view. My objective is to define complexity so that it is possible to compare it across languages and to approach its variation with the methods of quantitative typology. My main empirical research questions are: i) does language complexity vary in any systematic way in local domains, and ii) can language complexity be affected by the geographical or social environment? These questions are studied in three articles, whose findings are summarized in the introduction to the dissertation. In order to enable cross-language comparison, I measure complexity as the description length of the regularities in an entity; I separate it from difficulty, focus on local instead of global complexity, and break it up into different types. This approach helps avoid the problems that plagued earlier metrics of language complexity. My approach to grammar is functional-typological in nature, and the theoretical framework is basic linguistic theory. I delimit the empirical research functionally to the marking of core arguments (the basic participants in the sentence). I assess the distributions of complexity in this domain with multifactorial statistical methods and use different sampling strategies, implementing, for instance, the Greenbergian view of universals as diachronic laws of type preference. My data come from large and balanced samples (up to approximately 850 languages), drawn mainly from reference grammars. The results suggest that various significant trends occur in the marking of core arguments in regard to complexity and that complexity in this domain correlates with population size. These results provide evidence that linguistic patterns interact among themselves in terms of complexity, that language structure adapts to the social environment, and that there may be cognitive mechanisms that limit complexity locally. My approach to complexity and language universals can therefore be successfully applied to empirical data and may serve as a model for further research in these areas.

Truth, Proof and Gödelian Arguments : A Defence of Tarskian Truth in Mathematics

One of the most fundamental questions in the philosophy of mathematics concerns the relation between truth and formal proof. The position according to which the two concepts are the same is called deflationism, and the opposing viewpoint substantialism. In an important result of mathematical logic, Kurt Gödel proved in his first incompleteness theorem that all consistent formal systems containing arithmetic include sentences that can neither be proved nor disproved within that system. However, such undecidable Gödel sentences can be established to be true once we expand the formal system with Alfred Tarski s semantical theory of truth, as shown by Stewart Shapiro and Jeffrey Ketland in their semantical arguments for the substantiality of truth. According to them, in Gödel sentences we have an explicit case of true but unprovable sentences, and hence deflationism is refuted. Against that, Neil Tennant has shown that instead of Tarskian truth we can expand the formal system with a soundness principle, according to which all provable sentences are assertable, and the assertability of Gödel sentences follows. This way, the relevant question is not whether we can establish the truth of Gödel sentences, but whether Tarskian truth is a more plausible expansion than a soundness principle. In this work I will argue that this problem is best approached once we think of mathematics as the full human phenomenon, and not just consisting of formal systems. When pre-formal mathematical thinking is included in our account, we see that Tarskian truth is in fact not an expansion at all. I claim that what proof is to formal mathematics, truth is to pre-formal thinking, and the Tarskian account of semantical truth mirrors this relation accurately. However, the introduction of pre-formal mathematics is vulnerable to the deflationist counterargument that while existing in practice, pre-formal thinking could still be philosophically superfluous if it does not refer to anything objective. Against this, I argue that all truly deflationist philosophical theories lead to arbitrariness of mathematics. In all other philosophical accounts of mathematics there is room for a reference of the pre-formal mathematics, and the expansion of Tarkian truth can be made naturally. Hence, if we reject the arbitrariness of mathematics, I argue in this work, we must accept the substantiality of truth. Related subjects such as neo-Fregeanism will also be covered, and shown not to change the need for Tarskian truth. The only remaining route for the deflationist is to change the underlying logic so that our formal languages can include their own truth predicates, which Tarski showed to be impossible for classical first-order languages. With such logics we would have no need to expand the formal systems, and the above argument would fail. From the alternative approaches, in this work I focus mostly on the Independence Friendly (IF) logic of Jaakko Hintikka and Gabriel Sandu. Hintikka has claimed that an IF language can include its own adequate truth predicate. I argue that while this is indeed the case, we cannot recognize the truth predicate as such within the same IF language, and the need for Tarskian truth remains. In addition to IF logic, also second-order logic and Saul Kripke s approach using Kleenean logic will be shown to fail in a similar fashion.

Shooting from the Wild Zone : A Study of the Chicana Art Photographers Laura Aguilar, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, Delilah Montoya, and Kathy Vargas

The dissertation analyzes and elaborates upon the changing map of U.S. ethno-racial formation from the vantage point of North American Studies, multi-disciplinary cultural studies, and the criticism of visual culture. The focus is on four contemporary Mexican American (Chicana) women photographers, whose art production is discussed, on the one hand, in the context of the Euro-American history of photographic genres and, on the other hand, in the context of so-called decolonizing cultural and academic discourses produced by Mexican Americans themselves. The manuscript consists of two parts. Part I outlines the theoretical and methodological domain of the study, positioning it in the interstices of American studies, European postmodern criticism, postcolonial feminist theory, and the theories of visual culture, particularly of art photography. In addition, the main issues and paradigms of Chicano Studies (Mexican American ethnic studies) are introduced. Part II consists of seven essays, each of which discusses rather independently a particular photographic work or a series of photographs, formulating and defending arguments about their meaning, position in the history of photographic genres, and their cultural and socio-political significance. The study closes with a discussion about ethno-racial identity formation and the role of Chicana photography therein - in embodying and reproducing new subjectivities, alternative categories of knowledge, and open ended historical narratives. It is argued that, symbolically, the "Wild Zone" of gendered and race-specific knowledge becomes associated with the body of the mother, a recurrent image in Chicana art works under discussion. Embedded in this image, the construction of an alternative notion of a family thus articulates the parameters of a matrifocal ethno-racial community unified by the proliferation of differences rather than by conformities typical of nationalistic ideologies. While focusing on art photography, the study as a whole simultaneously constructs, from a European vantage point, a "thick" description of Mexican American history, identities, communities, cultural practices, and self-representations about which very little is known in Finland.

Honey flows through fertile valleys : The cognitive and evolutionary foundations of paradise representations

The aim of the study is to explain how paradise beliefs are born from the viewpoint of mental functions of the human mind. The focus is on the observation that paradise beliefs across the world are mutually more similar than dissimilar. By using recent theories and results from the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion as well as from studies of environmental preferences, I suggest that this is because pan-human unconscious motivations, the architecture of mind, and the way the human mind processes information constrain the possible repertoire of paradise beliefs. The study is divided into two parts, theoretical and empirical. The arguments in the theoretical part are tested with data in the empirical part with two data sets. The first data set was collected using an Internet survey. The second data set was derived from literary sources. The first data test the assumption that intuitive conceptions of an environment of dreams generally follow the outlines set by evolved environmental preferences, but that they can be tweaked by modifying the presence of desirable elements. The second data test the assumption that familiarity is a dominant factor determining the content of paradise beliefs. The results of the study show that in addition to the widely studied belief in supernatural agents, belief in supernatural environments wells from the natural functioning of the human mind attesting the view that religious thinking and ideas are natural for human species and are produced by the same mental mechanisms as other cultural information. The results also help us to understand that the mental structures behind the belief in the supernatural have a wider scope than has been previously acknowledged.

Rhetoric and Representation : Exploring the Cultural Meaning of the Natural Sciences in Contemporary Popular Science Writing and Literature

Kirjallisuuden- ja kulttuurintutkimus on viimeisten kolmen vuosikymmenen aikana tullut yhä enenevässä määrin tietoiseksi tieteen ja taiteen suhteen monimutkaisesta luonteesta. Nykyään näiden kahden kulttuurin tutkimus muodostaa oman kenttänsä, jolla niiden suhdetta tarkastellaan ennen kaikkea dynaamisena vuorovaikutuksena, joka heijastaa kulttuurimme kieltä, arvoja ja ideologisia sisältöjä. Toisin kuin aiemmat näkemykset, jotka pitävät tiedettä ja taidetta toisilleen enemmän tai vähemmän vastakkaisina pyrkimyksinä, nykytutkimus lähtee oletuksesta, jonka mukaan ne ovat kulttuurillisesti rakentuneita diskursseja, jotka kohtaavat usein samankaltaisia todellisuuden mallintamiseen liittyviä ongelmia, vaikka niiden käyttämät metodit eroavatkin toisistaan. Väitöskirjani keskittyy yllä mainitun suhteen osa-alueista popularisoidun tietokirjallisuuden (muun muassa Paul Davies, James Gleick ja Richard Dawkins) käyttämän kielen ja luonnontieteistä ideoita ammentavan kaunokirjallisuuden (muun muassa Jeanette Winterson, Tom Stoppard ja Richard Powers) hyödyntämien keinojen tarkasteluun nojautuen yli 30 teoksen kattavaa aineistoa koskevaan tyylin ja teemojen tekstianalyysiin. Populaarin tietokirjallisuuden osalta tarkoituksenani on osoittaa, että sen käyttämä kieli rakentuu huomattavassa määrin sellaisille rakenteille, jotka tarjoavat mahdollisuuden esittää todellisuutta koskevia argumentteja mahdollisimman vakuuttavalla tavalla. Tässä tehtävässä monilla klassisen retoriikan määrittelemillä kuvioilla on tärkeä rooli, koska ne auttavat liittämään sanotun sisällön ja muodon tiukasti toisiinsa: retoristen kuvioiden käyttö ei näin ollen edusta pelkkää tyylikeinoa, vaan se myös usein kiteyttää argumenttien taustalla olevat tieteenfilosofiset olettamukset ja auttaa vakiinnuttamaan argumentoinnin logiikan. Koska monet aikaisemmin ilmestyneistä tutkimuksista ovat keskittyneet pelkästään metaforan rooliin tieteellisissä argumenteissa, tämä väitöskirja pyrkii laajentamaan tutkimuskenttää analysoimalla myös toisenlaisten kuvioiden käyttöä. Osoitan myös, että retoristen kuvioiden käyttö muodostaa yhtymäkohdan tieteellisiä ideoita hyödyntävään kaunokirjallisuuteen. Siinä missä popularisoitu tiede käyttää retoriikkaa vahvistaakseen sekä argumentatiivisia että kaunokirjallisia ominaisuuksiaan, kuvaa tällainen sanataide tiedettä tavoilla, jotka usein heijastelevat tietokirjallisuuden kielellisiä rakenteita. Toisaalta on myös mahdollista nähdä, miten kaunokirjallisuuden keinot heijastuvat popularisoidun tieteen kerrontatapoihin ja kieleen todistaen kahden kulttuurin dynaamisesta vuorovaikutuksesta. Nykyaikaisen populaaritieteen retoristen elementtien ja kaunokirjallisuuden keinojen vertailu näyttää lisäksi, kuinka tiede ja taide osallistuvat keskusteluun kulttuurimme tiettyjen peruskäsitteiden kuten identiteetin, tiedon ja ajan merkityksestä. Tällä tavoin on mahdollista nähdä, että molemmat ovat perustavanlaatuisia osia merkityksenantoprosessissa, jonka kautta niin tieteelliset ideat kuin ihmiselämän suuret kysymyksetkin saavat kulttuurillisesti rakentuneen merkityksensä.

On the Origin of Ideas : An Abductivist Approach to Discovery

The purpose of this study is to analyze and develop various forms of abduction as a means of conceptualizing processes of discovery. Abduction was originally presented by Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) as a "weak", third main mode of inference -- besides deduction and induction -- one which, he proposed, is closely related to many kinds of cognitive processes, such as instincts, perception, practices and mediated activity in general. Both abduction and discovery are controversial issues in philosophy of science. It is often claimed that discovery cannot be a proper subject area for conceptual analysis and, accordingly, abduction cannot serve as a "logic of discovery". I argue, however, that abduction gives essential means for understanding processes of discovery although it cannot give rise to a manual or algorithm for making discoveries. In the first part of the study, I briefly present how the main trend in philosophy of science has, for a long time, been critical towards a systematic account of discovery. Various models have, however, been suggested. I outline a short history of abduction; first Peirce's evolving forms of his theory, and then later developments. Although abduction has not been a major area of research until quite recently, I review some critiques of it and look at the ways it has been analyzed, developed and used in various fields of research. Peirce's own writings and later developments, I argue, leave room for various subsequent interpretations of abduction. The second part of the study consists of six research articles. First I treat "classical" arguments against abduction as a logic of discovery. I show that by developing strategic aspects of abductive inference these arguments can be countered. Nowadays the term 'abduction' is often used as a synonym for the Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) model. I argue, however, that it is useful to distinguish between IBE ("Harmanian abduction") and "Hansonian abduction"; the latter concentrating on analyzing processes of discovery. The distinctions between loveliness and likeliness, and between potential and actual explanations are more fruitful within Hansonian abduction. I clarify the nature of abduction by using Peirce's distinction between three areas of "semeiotic": grammar, critic, and methodeutic. Grammar (emphasizing "Firstnesses" and iconicity) and methodeutic (i.e., a processual approach) especially, give new means for understanding abduction. Peirce himself held a controversial view that new abductive ideas are products of an instinct and an inference at the same time. I maintain that it is beneficial to make a clear distinction between abductive inference and abductive instinct, on the basis of which both can be developed further. Besides these, I analyze abduction as a part of distributed cognition which emphasizes a long-term interaction with the material, social and cultural environment as a source for abductive ideas. This approach suggests a "trialogical" model in which inquirers are fundamentally connected both to other inquirers and to the objects of inquiry. As for the classical Meno paradox about discovery, I show that abduction provides more than one answer. As my main example of abductive methodology, I analyze the process of Ignaz Semmelweis' research on childbed fever. A central basis for abduction is the claim that discovery is not a sequence of events governed only by processes of chance. Abduction treats those processes which both constrain and instigate the search for new ideas; starting from the use of clues as a starting point for discovery, but continuing in considerations like elegance and 'loveliness'. The study then continues a Peircean-Hansonian research programme by developing abduction as a way of analyzing processes of discovery.

Non-reductive Physicalism, Irreducibility of the Mental and the Problem of Mental Causation : A study of Donald Davidson's and Georg Henrik von Wright's positions in the philosophy of mind

In this study I consider what kind of perspective on the mind body problem is taken and can be taken by a philosophical position called non-reductive physicalism. Many positions fall under this label. The form of non-reductive physicalism which I discuss is in essential respects the position taken by Donald Davidson (1917-2003) and Georg Henrik von Wright (1916-2003). I defend their positions and discuss the unrecognized similarities between their views. Non-reductive physicalism combines two theses: (a) Everything that exists is physical; (b) Mental phenomena cannot be reduced to the states of the brain. This means that according to non-reductive physicalism the mental aspect of humans (be it a soul, mind, or spirit) is an irreducible part of the human condition. Also Davidson and von Wright claim that, in some important sense, the mental aspect of a human being does not reduce to the physical aspect, that there is a gap between these aspects that cannot be closed. I claim that their arguments for this conclusion are convincing. I also argue that whereas von Wright and Davidson give interesting arguments for the irreducibility of the mental, their physicalism is unwarranted. These philosophers do not give good reasons for believing that reality is thoroughly physical. Notwithstanding the materialistic consensus in the contemporary philosophy of mind the ontology of mind is still an uncharted territory where real breakthroughs are not to be expected until a radically new ontological position is developed. The third main claim of this work is that the problem of mental causation cannot be solved from the Davidsonian - von Wrightian perspective. The problem of mental causation is the problem of how mental phenomena like beliefs can cause physical movements of the body. As I see it, the essential point of non-reductive physicalism - the irreducibility of the mental - and the problem of mental causation are closely related. If mental phenomena do not reduce to causally effective states of the brain, then what justifies the belief that mental phenomena have causal powers? If mental causes do not reduce to physical causes, then how to tell when - or whether - the mental causes in terms of which human actions are explained are actually effective? I argue that this - how to decide when mental causes really are effective - is the real problem of mental causation. The motivation to explore and defend a non-reductive position stems from the belief that reductive physicalism leads to serious ethical problems. My claim is that Davidson's and von Wright's ultimate reason to defend a non-reductive view comes back to their belief that a reductive understanding of human nature would be a narrow and possibly harmful perspective. The final conclusion of my thesis is that von Wright's and Davidson's positions provide a starting point from which the current scientistic philosophy of mind can be critically further explored in the future.

Logic as the Universal Science : Bertrand Russell's Early Conception of Logic and Its Philosophical Context

Bertrand Russell (1872 1970) introduced the English-speaking philosophical world to modern, mathematical logic and foundational study of mathematics. The present study concerns the conception of logic that underlies his early logicist philosophy of mathematics, formulated in The Principles of Mathematics (1903). In 1967, Jean van Heijenoort published a paper, Logic as Language and Logic as Calculus, in which he argued that the early development of modern logic (roughly the period 1879 1930) can be understood, when considered in the light of a distinction between two essentially different perspectives on logic. According to the view of logic as language, logic constitutes the general framework for all rational discourse, or meaningful use of language, whereas the conception of logic as calculus regards logic more as a symbolism which is subject to reinterpretation. The calculus-view paves the way for systematic metatheory, where logic itself becomes a subject of mathematical study (model-theory). Several scholars have interpreted Russell s views on logic with the help of the interpretative tool introduced by van Heijenoort,. They have commonly argued that Russell s is a clear-cut case of the view of logic as language. In the present study a detailed reconstruction of the view and its implications is provided, and it is argued that the interpretation is seriously misleading as to what he really thought about logic. I argue that Russell s conception is best understood by setting it in its proper philosophical context. This is constituted by Immanuel Kant s theory of mathematics. Kant had argued that purely conceptual thought basically, the logical forms recognised in Aristotelian logic cannot capture the content of mathematical judgments and reasonings. Mathematical cognition is not grounded in logic but in space and time as the pure forms of intuition. As against this view, Russell argued that once logic is developed into a proper tool which can be applied to mathematical theories, Kant s views turn out to be completely wrong. In the present work the view is defended that Russell s logicist philosophy of mathematics, or the view that mathematics is really only logic, is based on what I term the Bolzanian account of logic . According to this conception, (i) the distinction between form and content is not explanatory in logic; (ii) the propositions of logic have genuine content; (iii) this content is conferred upon them by special entities, logical constants . The Bolzanian account, it is argued, is both historically important and throws genuine light on Russell s conception of logic.

Signifying Angels : Analyses and Interpretations of Rautavaara s Instrumental Compositions

The subject of doctoral thesis is the analysis and interpretation of instrumental pieces composed by Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928) that have been given angelic titles: Archangel Michael Fighting the Antichrist from the suite Icons (1955)/Before the Icons (2006), Angels and Visitations (1978), the Double Bass Concerto Angel of Dusk (1980), Playgrounds for Angels (1981)and the Seventh Symphony Angel of Light (1994). The aim of the work is to find those musical elements common to these pieces that distinguish them from Rautavaara s other works and to determine if they could be thought of as a series. I prove that behind the common elements and titles stands the same extramusical idea the figure of an angel that the composer has described in his commentaries. The thesis is divided into three parts. Since all of the compositions possess titles that refer to the spiritual symbol of an angel, the first part offers a theoretical background to demonstrate the significant role played by angels in various religions and beliefs, and the means by which music has attempted to represent this symbol throughout history. This background traces also Rautavaara s aesthetic attitude as a spiritual composer whose output can be studied with reference to his extramusical interests including literature, psychology, painting, philosophy and myths. The second part focuses on the analysis of the instrumental compositions with angelic titles, without giving consideration to their commentaries and titles. The analyses concentrate in particular on those musical features that distinguish these pieces from Rautavaara s other compositions. In the third part these musical features are interpreted as symbols of the angel through comparison with vocal and instrumental pieces which contain references to the character of an angel, structures of mythical narration, special musical expressions, use of instruments and aspects of brightness. Finally I explore the composer s interpretative codes, drawing on Rilke s cycle of poems Ten Duino Elegies and Jung s theory of archetypes, and analyze the instrumental pieces with angelic titles in the light of the theory of musical ekphrasis.

Aristotle on the Perception of Perception : Seeing, Remembering, and Sleeping

This study is an inquiry into three related topics in Aristotle’s psychology: the perception of seeing, the perception of past perception, and the perception of sleeping. Over the past decades, Aristotle’s account of the perception of perception has been studied in numerous articles and chapters of books. However, there is no monograph that attempts to give a comprehensive analysis of this account and to assess its relation and significance to Aristotle’s psychological theory in general as well as to other theories pertaining to the topics (e.g. theories of consciousness), be they ancient, medieval, modern, or contemporary. This study intends to fill this gap and to further the research into Aristotle’s philosophy and into the philosophy of mind. The present study is based on an accurate analysis of the sources, on their Platonic background, and on later interpretations within the commentary tradition up to the present. From a methodological point of view, this study represents systematically orientated research into the history of philosophy, in which special attention is paid to the philosophical problems inherent in the sources, to the distinctions drawn, and to the arguments put forward as well as to their philosophical assessment. In addition to contributing many new findings concerning the topics under discussion, this study shows that Aristotle’s account of the perception of perception substantially differs from many later theories of consciousness. This study also suggests that Aristotle be regarded as a consistent direct realist, not only in respect of sense perception, but also in respect of memory.