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On the idea of Bildung university
This week I gave a short presentation on the idea of Bildung university (‘sivistysyliopisto’ in Finnish). The notion of Bildung doesn’t quite translate to English but we have a word for it in Finnish, ‘sivistys’. Here Bildung university refers to the modern concept of research university from early 19th century, first embodied by the University of Berlin (founded in 1810).
It’s a lofty ideal and many of the ideas behind it come from German enlightenment and neohumanism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher - and Humboldt. Although it seems like a politically implausible picture of autonomous universities and academic freedom, incompatible with current managerialist trends in higher education, the Bildung university model has been remarkably resilient, and successful. Despite various pressures and mutations along the way, it still lies at the heart of our best research universities, not only in continental Europe but also in the US, where the German model was exported during the 19th century.
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Interview - Science, uncertainty and trust
Amanda Häkkinen (TSV) interviewed me about my research for a series on open science. We talked about scientific problem solving, Heidegger, uncertainty and trust. And other things. Here, (in Finnish).
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AI as a mirror for human intelligence
Inspired by dinner debates around New Year’s (2023), Renne Pesonen and I wrote an essay (in Finnish) on large language models.
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Encyclopedia entry on the philosophy of science
Tomi Kokkonen and I wrote a (long!) entry on the philosophy of science for the Logos encyclopedia. It’s in Finnish, but who cares in this age of chatGPT.
Tweets here.
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Workshop materials - Agent-based models in social epistemology
Materials from the computational methods workshop at the 2022 Summer school of the Vienna doctoral school of philosophy, finally on github.
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On positionality statements (In Finnish)
I talked to a journalist from Helsingin Sanomat about positionality statements in science (here). My email response turned into a micro essay, so I’ll post it here.
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Interview on basic research (in Finnish)
I, among several other researchers, was recently interviewed by the magazine Tekniikan Maailma about the importance of basic research. Here
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reijulab
Ok ok I know it’s silly. One man research lab. But my personal research section is called Reijulab from now on. Why? Why not!
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Diversity-ability-trade-off (@Philosophy of Science)
With Jaakko Kuorikoski, I have a new paper coming out in the Philosophy of Science (PSA2020/2021 proceedings). The paper examines the diversity-beats-ability theorem originally put forward by Lu Hong and Scott Page, 2004.
Long story short, (1) we don’t think the original model provides reliable evidence of diversity beating ability in group problem solving, but (2) we have an improved version of the model that can tell us something of interest about the trade-off between diversity and ability!
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Institutional epistemology
Here’s a link to a paper I wrote with Petri Ylikoski, where we outline the idea of institutional epistemology. (in Finnish!)
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