Antti Kauppinen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3866331 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Antti Kauppinen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Antti |
| FAMILY NAME | Kauppinen |
| SIGNATURE | KAUPPINEN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-0870-5080 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Purpose without devotion
Leading a meaningful life characteristically requires committing ourselves to something or someone of value, since valuable achievements and relationships require resolve, persistence, and even sacrifice. But how can we rationally commit to any particular thing when faced with normative uncertainty about the relative value of our options? In his recent work, Paul Katsafanas argues that we can only rationally sustain resolute commitments and a sen…
Reasons for questions and the norms of inquiry
Recently, many epistemologists have proposed instrumental norms of inquiry, that is, norms that concern taking means to answer the questions we are pursuing. But which questions should we pursue in the first place, and why? In this paper, I offer a novel defense of the radical pragmatist view, according to which there are no epistemic norms of inquiry, and all reasons to pursue questions and take means to answering them are practical. This includ…
Is there such a thing as epistemic blame
In his Epistemic Blame (2024), Cameron Boult presents a comprehensive account of epistemic blame as negative relationship modification in response to intellectual conduct that impairs an epistemic relationship. I articulate an alternative conception, according to which the proper basis for a critical epistemic response is violating epistemic normative expectations, and the response consists in holding the target epistemically accountable in a non…
Better life stories make better lives
Is it good for us if the different parts of our lives are connected to each other like the parts of a good story? Some philosophers have thought so, while others have firmly rejected it. In this paper, I focus on the state-of-the-art anti-narrativist arguments Amy Berg has recently presented in this journal. I argue that while she makes a good case that the best kind of lives for us do not revolve around a single project or theme, the best kind o…
Epistemic Welfare Bads and Other Failures of Reason
There is something important missing in our lives if we are thoroughly ignorant or misled about reality—even if intervention or fantastic luck prevents unhappiness and practical failure. But why? I argue that perfectionism about well-being offers the most promising explanation. My version says, roughly, that we flourish when we exercise our self-defining capacities successfully according to their constitutive aims. One of them is Reason, our capa…
Rationality as the rule of reason
This paper explores the prospects of a non‐structuralist account of rationality that doesn't postulate primitive structural requirements (whether of wide or narrow scope) for combinations of attitudes. Instead, it takes competent perceptions of reasons for attitudes to be basic. While broadly similar proposals have been offered before by Thomas Scanlon and Niko Kolodny, this paper adds two important elements to the picture. First, it argues that …
Dying for a Cause
Some people willingly risk or give up their lives for something they deeply believe in, for instance standing up to a dictator. A good example of this are members of the White Rose student resistance group, who rebelled against the Nazi regime and paid for it with their lives. I argue that when the cause is good, such risky activities (and even deaths themselves) can contribute to meaning in life in its different forms – meaning-as-mattering, mea…
Who Should Bear the Risk When Self‐Driving Vehicles Crash
The moral importance of liability to harm has so far been ignored in the lively debate about what self‐driving vehicles should be programmed to do when an accident is inevitable. But as discussions in the context of self‐defense have highlighted, liability matters a great deal to just distribution of risk of harm. While it is sometimes morally required simply to minimize the risk of relevant harms, this is not so when one party is responsible for…
Doing Valuable Time
Sadly, we're all going to die, so we have a finite amount of time at our disposal. How should we spend it if we want to lead a good and meaningful life? This is the question at the heart of Cheshire Calhoun's strikingly original Doing Valuable Time. As she observes, we are both evaluators who choose in the light of our values and take up attitudes toward what happens, and temporally oriented beings whose present is shaped by thoughts and implicit…
The world according to suffering
Given that suffering comes in many forms, from Andrew Solomon’s depression and the author&s;s mercifully short-lived agony to grief and loneliness and hunger, it’s a good question to ask what unifies them – what makes them all instances of suffering, and as such prima facie bad for the sufferer, with further motivational and normative consequences down the line. To begin unpacking the suggestion that suffering should be understood in terms of aff…
Methodology and Moral Philosophy
Methodology and Moral Philosophy
Hate and Punishment
According to legal expressivism, neither crime nor punishment consists merely in intentionally imposing some kind of harm on another. Crime and punishment also have an expressive aspect. They are what they are in part because they enact attitudes toward others—in the case of crime, some kind of disrespect, at least, and in the case of punishment, society’s condemnation or reprobation. Punishment is justified, at least in part, because (and when) …
Flourishing and Finitude
It would be terrible for us if humanity ceased to exist after we all die. But of course, eventually humanity will go out of existence. Does this result in a vicious regress if our flourishing hangs on what happens after us? Mark Johnston thinks so. In this note, I explain how Johnston's objection can be avoided. Briefly, our activities have a meaning horizon that extends for some generations after us. What matters is that we make a positive diffe…
Fittingness and Idealization
This note explores how ideal subjectivism in metanormative theory can help solve two important problems for Fitting Attitude analyses of value. The wrong-kind-of-reason problem is that there may be sufficient reason for attitude Y even if the object is not Y-able. The many-kinds-of-fittingness problem is that the same attitude can be fitting in many ways. Ideal subjectivism addresses both by maintaining that an attitude is W-ly fitting if and onl…
Meaningfulness and Time
Working Hard and Kicking Back
Dan Haybron has argued by counterexample that perfectionism fails as a theory of well-being. I respond by articulating two different versions of diachronic perfectionism, which takes into account the level of development and exercise of essential human capacities over the course of an entire lifetime
Moral Internalism and the Brain
The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy
In disputes about conceptual analysis, each side typically appeals to pre-theoretical ‘intuitions’ about particular cases. Recently, many naturalistically oriented philosophers have suggested that these appeals should be understood as empirical hypotheses about what people would say when presented with descriptions of situations, and have consequently conducted surveys on non-specialists. I argue that this philosophical research programme, a key …
Meaningfulness and Time
Fittingness and Idealization
This note explores how ideal subjectivism in metanormative theory can help solve two important problems for Fitting Attitude analyses of value. The wrong-kind-of-reason problem is that there may be sufficient reason for attitude Y even if the object is not Y-able. The many-kinds-of-fittingness problem is that the same attitude can be fitting in many ways. Ideal subjectivism addresses both by maintaining that an attitude is W-ly fitting if and onl…
The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy
In disputes about conceptual analysis, each side typically appeals to pre-theoretical ‘intuitions’ about particular cases. Recently, many naturalistically oriented philosophers have suggested that these appeals should be understood as empirical hypotheses about what people would say when presented with descriptions of situations, and have consequently conducted surveys on non-specialists. I argue that this philosophical research programme, a key …
Moral Internalism and the Brain
Working Hard and Kicking Back
Dan Haybron has argued by counterexample that perfectionism fails as a theory of well-being. I respond by articulating two different versions of diachronic perfectionism, which takes into account the level of development and exercise of essential human capacities over the course of an entire lifetime
Meaningfulness and Time
Flourishing and Finitude
It would be terrible for us if humanity ceased to exist after we all die. But of course, eventually humanity will go out of existence. Does this result in a vicious regress if our flourishing hangs on what happens after us? Mark Johnston thinks so. In this note, I explain how Johnston's objection can be avoided. Briefly, our activities have a meaning horizon that extends for some generations after us. What matters is that we make a positive diffe…
Fittingness and Idealization
This note explores how ideal subjectivism in metanormative theory can help solve two important problems for Fitting Attitude analyses of value. The wrong-kind-of-reason problem is that there may be sufficient reason for attitude Y even if the object is not Y-able. The many-kinds-of-fittingness problem is that the same attitude can be fitting in many ways. Ideal subjectivism addresses both by maintaining that an attitude is W-ly fitting if and onl…
Hate and Punishment
According to legal expressivism, neither crime nor punishment consists merely in intentionally imposing some kind of harm on another. Crime and punishment also have an expressive aspect. They are what they are in part because they enact attitudes toward others—in the case of crime, some kind of disrespect, at least, and in the case of punishment, society’s condemnation or reprobation. Punishment is justified, at least in part, because (and when) …
Methodology and Moral Philosophy
Methodology and Moral Philosophy
The world according to suffering
Given that suffering comes in many forms, from Andrew Solomon’s depression and the author&s;s mercifully short-lived agony to grief and loneliness and hunger, it’s a good question to ask what unifies them – what makes them all instances of suffering, and as such prima facie bad for the sufferer, with further motivational and normative consequences down the line. To begin unpacking the suggestion that suffering should be understood in terms of aff…
Rationality as the rule of reason
This paper explores the prospects of a non‐structuralist account of rationality that doesn't postulate primitive structural requirements (whether of wide or narrow scope) for combinations of attitudes. Instead, it takes competent perceptions of reasons for attitudes to be basic. While broadly similar proposals have been offered before by Thomas Scanlon and Niko Kolodny, this paper adds two important elements to the picture. First, it argues that …
Dying for a Cause
Some people willingly risk or give up their lives for something they deeply believe in, for instance standing up to a dictator. A good example of this are members of the White Rose student resistance group, who rebelled against the Nazi regime and paid for it with their lives. I argue that when the cause is good, such risky activities (and even deaths themselves) can contribute to meaning in life in its different forms – meaning-as-mattering, mea…
Who Should Bear the Risk When Self‐Driving Vehicles Crash
The moral importance of liability to harm has so far been ignored in the lively debate about what self‐driving vehicles should be programmed to do when an accident is inevitable. But as discussions in the context of self‐defense have highlighted, liability matters a great deal to just distribution of risk of harm. While it is sometimes morally required simply to minimize the risk of relevant harms, this is not so when one party is responsible for…
Doing Valuable Time
Sadly, we're all going to die, so we have a finite amount of time at our disposal. How should we spend it if we want to lead a good and meaningful life? This is the question at the heart of Cheshire Calhoun's strikingly original Doing Valuable Time. As she observes, we are both evaluators who choose in the light of our values and take up attitudes toward what happens, and temporally oriented beings whose present is shaped by thoughts and implicit…
Epistemic Welfare Bads and Other Failures of Reason
There is something important missing in our lives if we are thoroughly ignorant or misled about reality—even if intervention or fantastic luck prevents unhappiness and practical failure. But why? I argue that perfectionism about well-being offers the most promising explanation. My version says, roughly, that we flourish when we exercise our self-defining capacities successfully according to their constitutive aims. One of them is Reason, our capa…
Better life stories make better lives
Is it good for us if the different parts of our lives are connected to each other like the parts of a good story? Some philosophers have thought so, while others have firmly rejected it. In this paper, I focus on the state-of-the-art anti-narrativist arguments Amy Berg has recently presented in this journal. I argue that while she makes a good case that the best kind of lives for us do not revolve around a single project or theme, the best kind o…
Purpose without devotion
Leading a meaningful life characteristically requires committing ourselves to something or someone of value, since valuable achievements and relationships require resolve, persistence, and even sacrifice. But how can we rationally commit to any particular thing when faced with normative uncertainty about the relative value of our options? In his recent work, Paul Katsafanas argues that we can only rationally sustain resolute commitments and a sen…
Reasons for questions and the norms of inquiry
Recently, many epistemologists have proposed instrumental norms of inquiry, that is, norms that concern taking means to answer the questions we are pursuing. But which questions should we pursue in the first place, and why? In this paper, I offer a novel defense of the radical pragmatist view, according to which there are no epistemic norms of inquiry, and all reasons to pursue questions and take means to answering them are practical. This includ…
Is there such a thing as epistemic blame
In his Epistemic Blame (2024), Cameron Boult presents a comprehensive account of epistemic blame as negative relationship modification in response to intellectual conduct that impairs an epistemic relationship. I articulate an alternative conception, according to which the proper basis for a critical epistemic response is violating epistemic normative expectations, and the response consists in holding the target epistemically accountable in a non…
Epistemology (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (8 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (5 works) · Free Will and Agency (5 works) · Normative (5 works) · Social Psychology (5 works)