The experienced quality of urban environments has not traditionally been at the forefront of understanding how cities evolve through time. Within the humanistic tradition, the temporal dimension of cities has been dealt with through tracing urban or architectural histories or interpreting science-fiction scenarios, for example. However, attempts at understanding the relation between currently existing components of cities and planning based on them, towards the future, has not captured the experience of the temporal layers of cities to a satisfying degree. Contemporary (...) urban environments comprise both lasting and fairly stable elements as well as those that change continuously: change is an inevitable part of urban life. Different aspects of city life evolve with a different tempo: urban nature has its cycles, inhabitants their rhythms, and building materials and styles different lifespans, for example. Recognizing them becomes an especially important issue when future imaginaries are projected onto existing urban structures and when decisions about the details of urban futures are made. This paper aims at bringing environmental and urban aesthetics into the discussion about the possible directions of urban futures. The focus is on introducing the notion of aesthetic sustainability as a tool to better understand how urban futures unfold experientially and how aesthetic values of urban environments develop with time. This concept has some background in the field of design theory, more specifically in sustainable usage and product design, but it has not so far been used in order to study large scale living environments. The concept can prove to be a valuable supporting tool in urban sustainability transformations based on how it captures the experiential side of the physical and temporal dimensions of cities. (shrink)

During the past few decades, everyday aesthetics has established itself as a new branch of philosophical aesthetics alongside the more traditional philosophy of art. The Paths from Philosophy of Art to Everyday Aesthetics explores the intimate relations between these two branches of contemporary aesthetics. The essays collected in this volume discuss a wide range of topics from aesthetic intimacy to the nature of modernity and the essence of everydayness, which play important roles both in the philosophy of art and everyday (...) aesthetics. With these essays, the writers and editors of this volume wish to commemorate professor Arto Haapala on his 60th birthday. -/- This collection of articles is intended for scholars and students working in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and art studies. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has made relevant questions regarding the limits and the justifications of sovereign power as nation states utilize high degrees of power over populations in their strategies of countering the virus. In our article, we analyze a particularly important facet of the strategy of sovereignty in managing the affects caused by a pandemic, which we term the ontology of war. We analyze the way in which war plays a significant role in the political ontology of our societies, through (...) its aiming to produce a unified political subject and an external enemy. Taking our theoretical cue from Butler’s thinking on frames of recognizability we extend her theory through augmenting it with affect theory to argue for how the frame of recognizability produced by the ontology of war fails to guide our understanding of the pandemic as a political problem, a failure that we analyze through looking at the affective register. We argue that the main affect that the nation state tries to manage, in relation to the pandemic, through the ontology of war is anxiety. We show that the nation state tries to alleviate anxiety by framing it through the ontology war, this leads to the appearance of a potentially racist and nationalist affective climate where the “enemy” is no longer felt to be the virus, but members of other nations as well as minorities. We argue that the pandemic reveals both the political ontology of war central to the foundation of our political communities, and how this ontology is used by the nation state to manage feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Ultimately, as we will discuss at the end of this article, this leads to failure. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze the political ontology of the nation state in the context of the pandemic and cosider how the virus has been made a part of it. Our argument is that the discourse regarding a war on the virus embodies an attempt to control the chronic insecurity and anxiety caused by the pandemic. Combining the work of Coernelius Castoriadis and the affect theoretical approach of Andreja Zevnik and Brian Massumi, we build a framework through which we make (...) intelligible the foundational role played by historically constituted shared networks of meaning and the political ontology it creates, as well as the affects leaning on it in our reactions towards the pandemic. By analyzing Carl Schmitt's understanding of politics, we locate the political ontology framing the pandemic as an ontology of war. Through this, we make visible how the management of insecurity through the distinction between friend and enemy becomes an affective channel for the insecurity caused by the pandemic. (shrink)

Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, several changes have been forcibly made and observed in various fields and areas of society, one of which include the field of education; the foundation of the formation of intellect and knowledge. After two years of studying indoors and private educational institutions holding virtual classes, the time has finally come for students to be re- adjusted once more to the blended mode of learning; a combination of virtual and in-person classes. Thus, this study aimed to (...) investigate the development of students’ study habits and how these habits could potentially affect the students’ academic achievement or performance. The study utilized a descriptivecorrelational design to examine the impact of study habits to the academic performance of 137 senior high school students. The study made use of the Palsane and Sharma’s Study Habits Inventory, or also known as PSSHI, and using this instrument, the study has been able to procure sufficient results that will answer the present study’s problems. Using linear regression analysis, the present study found that there was a significance between the study habits and academic performance of the senior high school students, thus the study’s null hypothesis was eventually rejected. (shrink)

Book review of Martin Heidegger, Kant ja metafysiikan ongelma [Kant und das problem der Metaphysik], translated into Finnish by Markku Lehtinen (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2020).

Understanding the buying and shopping behaviour of current and potential consumers is essential in formulating a successful marketing strategy. It is no longer sufficient for companies to merely produce goods or provide services; companies must know who their consumers are, why they buy, when, where and at what price they buy, and what benefits they expect to gain from the purchase. Companies also need to identify how far consumers are willing to travel to make their purchases and whether the size (...) of the sales area plays a significant role in their preferences. Retailers must also determine whether their customers prefer online shopping or want to buy and spend their leisure time in shopping centres. The paper aims at presenting the selected current trends in buying and shopping through elaborating an overview of the selected research studies and secondary data. The paper also gives an overview of contemporary trends in shopping, customer preferences with regard to types of retail outlets, e-commerce as such, buying and shopping in the online environment and, last but not least, the changes in consumer behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic. -/- Pochopenie nákupného správania súčasných a potenciálnych spotrebiteľov je podstatou úspešnej marketingovej orientácie na trhu. Nestačí už len vyrábať výrobky, resp. Poskytovať služby, je potrebné poznať, kto je spotrebiteľ, prečo nakupuje, kedy a kde nakupuje, za akú cenu a aký úžitok od nákupu očakáva. Akú vzdialenosť je ochotný prejsť za nákupmi, či hrá v tejto preferencii podstatnú úlohu predajná plocha predajne, alebo vzdialenosť. Či preferuje online prostredie, alebo chce okrem nákupov (hlavne) v nákupných centrách tráviť aj svoj voľný čas. Cieľom nášho príspevku bolo zhodnotiť vybrané súčasné trendy v nakupovaní prostredníctvom spracovania prehľadu vybraných výskumov a sekundárnych dát. V príspevku sa stručne venujeme prehľadu súčasných trendov v nakupovaní, preferenciám spotrebiteľov podľa typu predajní, elektronickému obchodu ako takému, nakupovaniu v online prostredí a v neposlednom rade aj zmenám v spotrebiteľskom správaní počas trvania pandemie COVID-19. (shrink)

Thomas Elsaesser’s recent scholarship has examined the “mind-game film”, a phenomenon in Hollywood that is broadly characterised by multi-platform storytelling, paratextual narrative feedback loops, nonlinear storytelling, and unreliable character perspectives. While “mind-game” or “puzzle” films have become a contentious subject amongst post-cinema scholars concerned with Hollywood storytelling, what is to be said of contemporary European independent cinema? Elsaesser’s timely publication, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy, examines an amalgam of politically inclined European auteurs to resolve this query. Elsaesser concedes that there (...) exists a phenomenological confluence between the mind-game film and contemporary European cinema. For instance, both produce characters afflicted by productive pathologies, designating new socially useful forms of agency and identity. One only needs to consult the amnesiac protagonist M (Markku Peltola) in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past (Mies vailla menneisyyttä, 2002) or, as regards Lars von Trier’s cinema, Beth (Emily Watson) in Breaking the Waves (1996), Selma (Björk) in Dancer in the Dark (2000), “She” (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Antichrist (2009) or Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Nymphomaniac (2013) to evince this overlap. However, this book is more concerned with performative self-contradictions, whereby cinema-as-enunciator is put under erasure, thus aggravating the inherent discrepancies troubling Europe today. Elsaesser, indeed, evaluates a growing general disaffection with politics, the rise of populist nationalism and far-right fringe parties, as well as an increasing population of economic migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. (shrink)

La presente obra ofrece un análisis crítico de la filosofía de la economía de Uskali Mäki; en particular de la consideración realista científica de la economía. Se intenta a lo largo del texto responder, de algún modo, a las preguntas que plantea Lehtinen en la introducción: “¿Están los economistas aspirando en absoluto a la verdad, o están solamente jugando un juego intelectual en que tales supuestos son aceptables por alguna razón misteriosa? ¿Están estudiando la economía en serio? ¿Están simplemente (...) desinteresados en la verdad?, o ¿hay tal vez alguna otra forma de considerar sus prácticas de modelar?” p. 1. (shrink)