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)

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)

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)

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

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)