Sami Pihlström
Biographic Data
| ID | 165125 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sami Pihlström |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sami |
| FAMILY NAME | Pihlström |
| SIGNATURE | PIHLSTRÖM S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6410-8382 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
"The Unthinkable" in Ethics, History and Philosophical Anthropology: A Pragmatic-Transcendental View
What we find 'unthinkable' is not seriously considered as an ethical option in our thought and deliberation; it is ruled out from the outset. Combining a broadly pragmatist approach with a Kantian-inspired transcendental strategy, Sami Pihlström distinguishes between what is considered 'unthinkable' and what is merely ethically wrong.Pihlström demonstrates how different issues concerning the unthinkable vs the thinkable, ranging from the proper e…
Responses to My Critics
Situated Religious Cognition in Jamesian Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion
Pragmatist philosophy of religion has, since the early days of the tradition, developed distinctive accounts of (what we now call) "situated" religious cognition highly relevant to currently ongoing discussions in this developing field. This paper focuses on William James's pragmatism as an important example of such an approach in the philosophy of religion. Some central "situational" themes in James are identified, and special attention is given…
Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy
The essays collected emphasize that our relation to the world we live in and seek to represent and get to know better is irreducibly valuational.
Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments Between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy
Toista ajatellen. Historiallisia ja kulttuurisia näkökulmia toiseuden kohtaamiseen
Thinking about the Other. Historical and Cultural Perspectives on Encountering Otherness Human lives are crucially shaped by encounters of otherness – or, rather, various othernesses. This book explores the ethical challenge of developing an appropriate and respectful relation to other human beings by analyzing a number of historical and cultural cases of relating to the other. The topics range from barbarism, racist stereotypes, female rhetoric,…
Toward a Pragmatist Philosophy of the Humanities
Transsendentaalinen humanismi
Pragmatic Realism, Religious Truth, and Antitheodicy: On Viewing the World by Acknowledging the Other
Both as a traditional theological issue and in its broader secular varieties, theodicy remains a problem in the philosophy of religion. In this book, Professor Sami Pihlström provides a novel critical reassessment of the theodicy discourse addressing the problem of evil and suffering. He develops an antitheodicist view, arguing that theodicies seeking to render apparently meaningless suffering meaningful or justified from a “God’s-Eye-View” ultim…
Meaning Agnosticism and Pragmatism
This paper proposes to reconsider agnosticism by taking a step onto a meta-level, investigating agnosticism not as an epistemic stance regarding the choice between theism and atheism, but as a stance toward the question concerning the cognitive meaningfulness and/or truth-aptness of religious discourse. It is argued that this "meta-level" meaning agnosticism may actually be an attractive articulation of a certain kind of religious attitude. While…
Finnish Versions of Pragmatist Humanism: Eino Kaila and Georg Henrik von Wright as Quasi-Pragmatists
This essay introduces two leading Finnish philosophers of the twentieth century, Eino Kaila and Georg Henrik von Wright, who not only established analytic philosophy in Finland but also made original contributions to the development of pragmatism. The pragmatist dimensions of Kaila’s thought were clearly influenced by the classical American pragmatists, primarily William James, whose writings Kaila read and commented on already at an early stage …
Meaningful and meaningless suffering
The problem of suffering crucially focuses on meaninglessness. Meaningful suffering—suffering having some “point” or function—is not as problematic as absurd suffering that cannot be rendered purposeful. This issue is more specific than the problem of the “meaning of life” (or “meaning in life”). Human lives are often full of suffering experienced as serving no purpose whatsoever – indeed, suffering that may threaten to make life itself meaningle…
A Pragmatist Approach to the Mutual Recognition between Ethico-Political and Theological Discourses on Evil and Suffering
This paper considers what may be taken to be a hitherto somewhat neglected issue in political theology: how should the division, or dichotomy, between two rather different responses to the problem of evil and suffering – that is, the theological and the secular ethico-political approaches – be understood and (possibly) overcome? It is suggested that pragmatism can utilize the theory of recognition in bridging this gap between two apparently very …
Comparing Three Twentieth-Century Philosophical Antitheodicies
This paper compares three twentieth-century examples of antitheodicist thought in the philosophy of religion (and, more generally, ethics): William James’s pragmatism, D.Z. Phillips’s Wittgensteinianism, and Emmanuel Levinas’s post-Holocaust ethical reflection on suffering. It is argued that all three—despite their enormous differences, given that the three thinkers discussed come from distinct philosophical traditions—share the fundamental antit…
Logical Empiricism and Pragmatism
Theodicies as Failures of Recognition
This paper examines the ethical failure of theodicies by integrating the perspectives of philosophical argumentation and literary reading and analysis. The paper consists of two main parts. In the first part, we propose an ethical critique of metaphysical realism by analyzing its inability to recognize the perspectival plurality and diversity of suffering. As theodicies seek to explain how an omnipotent, omniscient, and absolutely benevolent God …
Anti-Kantianism, an Anti-Pragmatist Gesture
Giovanni Maddalena’s The Philosophy of Gesture: Completing Pragmatists’ Incomplete Revolution is an ambitious, original, and creative contribution to the re-evaluation of the history of pragmatism and its contemporary legacy in various areas of philosophy, ranging from logic and the theory of reasoning to the philosophy of science and art, as well as ethics and the philosophy of education. A reader can only admire the author’s broad and deep know…
Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James By Sarin Marchetti
Controlling death: Philosophical thanatology meets pragmatism
This essay examines philosophically the tension between controlling death and giving up or surrendering control. It can be argued that human mortality is the ultimate challenge to our attempts to maintain control over our lives. It is suggested that we may fruitfully respond to – while never fully resolving – this issue by integrating the approaches of transcendental philosophy and pragmatism. Some pragmatist thinkers (William James, Richard Shus…
Ana Honnacker, Post-säkularer Liberalismus: Perspektiven auf Religion und Öffentlichkeit im Anschluss an William James
William James is generally regarded as the most important classical pragmatist in the philosophy of religion; more generally, he can be considered one of the founding figures of what is today known as interdisciplinary religious studies. However, James is famous for emphasizing, or even over-emphasizing, individual religious experience, and he has rarely been discussed as a theorist of religion as a societal form of life, let alone of political i…
Academic publishing and interdisciplinarity: Finnish experiences
This essay discusses some current challenges in academic publishing and interdisciplinarity, including interdisciplinary publishing, by referring to some recent experiences in the Finnish academic community. In particular, the recent “Publication Forum” exercise, organized in Finland by the Finnish Federation of Learned Societies, is briefly analyzed. Journal rankings play important roles but may also be used in problematic ways. Interdisciplinar…
Margolis on Realism and Idealism
Joseph Margolis has written on the problem of realism voluminously over several decades – in addition to the enormous number of other philosophical debates he has contributed to in original ways. His latest book, Pragmatism Ascendent, discusses a wide spectrum of philosophical issues, including the transformations of transcendental philosophy today in terms of (Hegelian) historicity and ‘flux,’ as well as the question of “what it is to be a human…
A New Look at Wittgenstein and Pragmatism
This essay reconsiders Wittgenstein’s relation to the pragmatist tradition. I first discuss, from a pragmatist perspective, three key issues of Wittgenstein studies: the distinction – invoked in recent discussions of On Certainty, in particular – between the propositional and the non-propositional (section 2); the tension between anti-Cartesian fallibilism and what has been called the ‘truth in skepticism’ in Wittgenstein (section 3); as well as …
The Problem of Evil and the Limits of Philosophy: Toward a Pragmatist Appreciation Of the Impossibility of Theodicies
Morton White’s philosophy of culture: Holistic pragmatism and interdisciplinary inquiry
This paper explicates and defends Morton White’s holistic pragmatism, the view that descriptive and normative statements form a “seamless web” which must be tested as a “unified whole”. This position, originally formulated as a methodological and epistemic principle, can be extended into a more general philosophy of culture, as White himself has shown in his book, A Philosophy of Culture (2002). On the basis of holistic pragmatism, the paper also…
A New Look at Wittgenstein and Pragmatism
This essay reconsiders Wittgenstein’s relation to the pragmatist tradition. I first discuss, from a pragmatist perspective, three key issues of Wittgenstein studies: the distinction – invoked in recent discussions of On Certainty, in particular – between the propositional and the non-propositional (section 2); the tension between anti-Cartesian fallibilism and what has been called the ‘truth in skepticism’ in Wittgenstein (section 3); as well as …
Quine and Pragmatism
This paper discusses critically W.V. Quine's relation to the tradition of pragmatism. Even though Quine is often regarded as a pragmatist, it is far from clear what his commitment to pragmatism actually amounts to. It is argued that while there are pragmatist elements in Quine's position, this is not sufficient to classify him as a pragmatist in any strong historical sense; indeed, he was not even clear himself what it means to be a pragmatist. I…
Theodicies as Failures of Recognition
This paper examines the ethical failure of theodicies by integrating the perspectives of philosophical argumentation and literary reading and analysis. The paper consists of two main parts. In the first part, we propose an ethical critique of metaphysical realism by analyzing its inability to recognize the perspectival plurality and diversity of suffering. As theodicies seek to explain how an omnipotent, omniscient, and absolutely benevolent God …
Meaning Agnosticism and Pragmatism
This paper proposes to reconsider agnosticism by taking a step onto a meta-level, investigating agnosticism not as an epistemic stance regarding the choice between theism and atheism, but as a stance toward the question concerning the cognitive meaningfulness and/or truth-aptness of religious discourse. It is argued that this "meta-level" meaning agnosticism may actually be an attractive articulation of a certain kind of religious attitude. While…
Meaningful and meaningless suffering
The problem of suffering crucially focuses on meaninglessness. Meaningful suffering—suffering having some “point” or function—is not as problematic as absurd suffering that cannot be rendered purposeful. This issue is more specific than the problem of the “meaning of life” (or “meaning in life”). Human lives are often full of suffering experienced as serving no purpose whatsoever – indeed, suffering that may threaten to make life itself meaningle…
What shall we do with emergence? A survey of a fundamental issue in the metaphysics and epistemology of science
A survey of some recent literature on the concept of emergence provides a case study of an important issue in the general metaphysics and epistemology of science. Emergentism has often been motivated by the desire to avoid excessive reductionism in the philosophy of mind and culture and in the respective fields of the philosophy of science—philosophy of psychology and of the human and social sciences. Philosophers employing the concept of emergen…
Structuring the world: The Issue of Realism and the Nature of Ontological Problems in Classical and Contemporary Pragmatism
How Minds Understand Their World: Remarks on John McDowell’s Naturalism, Kantianism, and Pragmatism
What shall we do with emergence? A survey of a fundamental issue in the metaphysics and epistemology of science
A survey of some recent literature on the concept of emergence provides a case study of an important issue in the general metaphysics and epistemology of science. Emergentism has often been motivated by the desire to avoid excessive reductionism in the philosophy of mind and culture and in the respective fields of the philosophy of science—philosophy of psychology and of the human and social sciences. Philosophers employing the concept of emergen…
Thought and Health: On Therapeutical Philosophy and Philosophical Therapy
Problems related to human life in an increasingly "medicalized" society ought to be investigated in an interdisciplinary fashion by humanistic disciplines and the social sciences. The present metaphilosophical essay discusses the conception of philosophy as a therapeutical activity aiming at the "cure" of certain "illnesses" of thought and, thus, at "healthy" ways of thinking about human life and the world at large. It is suggested, in particular…
Death—mine or the other's? On the possibility of philosophical thanatology
This essay investigates the phenomenon of death from a philosophical (more specifically, transcendental) point of view. It is suggested that mortality can be viewed as a necessary condition for the possibility of asking certain philosophical questions about human life, e.g. questions concerning the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life. The transcendental approach leads to difficulties, however, because of the essentially solipsistic characte…
Death - mine or the other's? On the possibility of philosophical thanatology
Death mine or the other's? On the possibility of philosophical thanatology
Conceptual Relativity, Contextualization and Ontological Commitments
Wonder and Trust (Rearticulating the Ethical Structure of "Human Nature" through a Transcendental Philosophy of Childhood)
Article Wonder and Trust (Rearticulating the Ethical Structure of "Human Nature" through a Transcendental Philosophy of Childhood) was published on June 1, 2004 in the journal Human Affairs (volume 14, issue 1)
A pragmatic critique of three kinds of religious naturalism
This paper takes a critical look at a number of recent attempts to reconcile religious and scientifi c ways of thinking. Three basic programs of what I call "religious naturalism" are discussed: (1) attempts to synthesize science and religion by defending a combination of (Christian) theism and naturalism by means of the concept of emergence; (2) "demythologized" interpretations of religious statements, allegedly rendering them compatible with sc…
Emergent Truth and a Blind Spot, An Argument against Physicalism
Quine and Pragmatism
This paper discusses critically W.V. Quine's relation to the tradition of pragmatism. Even though Quine is often regarded as a pragmatist, it is far from clear what his commitment to pragmatism actually amounts to. It is argued that while there are pragmatist elements in Quine's position, this is not sufficient to classify him as a pragmatist in any strong historical sense; indeed, he was not even clear himself what it means to be a pragmatist. I…
Transcendental Guilt: On an Emotional Condition of Moral Experience
This article considers a central ethically relevant interpersonal emotion, guilt. It is argued that guilt, as an irreducible moral category, has a constitutive role to play in our ways of conceptualizing our relations to other people. Without experiencing guilt, or being able to do so, we would not be capable of employing the moral concepts and judgments we do employ. Elaborating on this argument, the paper deals with what may be described as the…
Mortality as a Philosophical-Anthropological Issue: "Thanatology, Normativity, and "Human Nature
Mortality as a Philosophical-Anthropological Issue: Thanatology, Normativity, and "Human Nature" This paper examines mortality—the fact that we humans are all going to die—as an issue in philosophical anthropology, by applying a fourfold typology of some key forms of philosophical anthropology to the topic of death and mortality. First, this typology, originally suggested by Heikki Kannisto, is outlined; the mortality issue is, then, viewed from …
Pragmatist metaphysics
A Recent Guide to the Study of Pragmatism
A Recent Guide to the Study of Pragmatism
Nordic Pragmatism
I am grateful to Torjus Midtgarden for his help with "Norwegian pragmatism," to Rein Vihalemm for a conversation on Estonian
The Ethics of Energy: William James's Moral Philosophy in Focus By Sergio Franzese
Morton White’s philosophy of culture: Holistic pragmatism and interdisciplinary inquiry
This paper explicates and defends Morton White’s holistic pragmatism, the view that descriptive and normative statements form a “seamless web” which must be tested as a “unified whole”. This position, originally formulated as a methodological and epistemic principle, can be extended into a more general philosophy of culture, as White himself has shown in his book, A Philosophy of Culture (2002). On the basis of holistic pragmatism, the paper also…
Margolis on Realism and Idealism
Joseph Margolis has written on the problem of realism voluminously over several decades – in addition to the enormous number of other philosophical debates he has contributed to in original ways. His latest book, Pragmatism Ascendent, discusses a wide spectrum of philosophical issues, including the transformations of transcendental philosophy today in terms of (Hegelian) historicity and ‘flux,’ as well as the question of “what it is to be a human…
A New Look at Wittgenstein and Pragmatism
This essay reconsiders Wittgenstein’s relation to the pragmatist tradition. I first discuss, from a pragmatist perspective, three key issues of Wittgenstein studies: the distinction – invoked in recent discussions of On Certainty, in particular – between the propositional and the non-propositional (section 2); the tension between anti-Cartesian fallibilism and what has been called the ‘truth in skepticism’ in Wittgenstein (section 3); as well as …
The Problem of Evil and the Limits of Philosophy: Toward a Pragmatist Appreciation Of the Impossibility of Theodicies
Academic publishing and interdisciplinarity: Finnish experiences
This essay discusses some current challenges in academic publishing and interdisciplinarity, including interdisciplinary publishing, by referring to some recent experiences in the Finnish academic community. In particular, the recent “Publication Forum” exercise, organized in Finland by the Finnish Federation of Learned Societies, is briefly analyzed. Journal rankings play important roles but may also be used in problematic ways. Interdisciplinar…
Controlling death: Philosophical thanatology meets pragmatism
This essay examines philosophically the tension between controlling death and giving up or surrendering control. It can be argued that human mortality is the ultimate challenge to our attempts to maintain control over our lives. It is suggested that we may fruitfully respond to – while never fully resolving – this issue by integrating the approaches of transcendental philosophy and pragmatism. Some pragmatist thinkers (William James, Richard Shus…
Ana Honnacker, Post-säkularer Liberalismus: Perspektiven auf Religion und Öffentlichkeit im Anschluss an William James
William James is generally regarded as the most important classical pragmatist in the philosophy of religion; more generally, he can be considered one of the founding figures of what is today known as interdisciplinary religious studies. However, James is famous for emphasizing, or even over-emphasizing, individual religious experience, and he has rarely been discussed as a theorist of religion as a societal form of life, let alone of political i…
Philosophy (37 works) · Epistemology (36 works) · Pragmatism (22 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education (10 works) · Metaphysics (9 works) · Theology and Philosophy of Evil (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Philosophy, Science, and History (6 works)