Filosofin elämä
Sälli Hyvinkäältä
E. Saarinen on tavallinen sälli Hyvinkäältä, joka elää Helsingin keskustassa rakastamallaan Bulevardilla.
E. Saarinen is a regular guy from Hyvinkää, Finland, who lives in the center of Helsinki on the street Bulevardi (”the Boulevard”), a street he loves for its green, middle-European flavour and for its nearness to Cafe Ekberg, a favorite hang-out. He is a philosopher of the everyday who wants to help people to flourish in their lives, who loves his family, and struggles to improve his own act. The big dream is to walk on his home street Bulevardi at the age of 80, completely bald, wearing a pink tuxedo, and tremendously in love with the Lady of His Life, the Queen, looking at her in the same way as he did at the time he was courting her in the early 1980’s. (Esa already owns the Pink Tuxedo – a gift from participants of one of Esa’s Paphos Seminars.)
Young doctor
Esa got his doctorate at the age of 24 at the University of Helsinki, working under the ingenious Professor Jaakko Hintikka. The exciting and excited athmosphere of Hintikka’s research group was magnificently uplifting to Esa, with superb talents and great personalities such as Simo Knuuttila, Lauri Carlson and Ilkka Niiniluoto as close collegagues and friends. The Helsinki Philosophy Department of the 1970’s was at the height of its powers. In addition to Hintikka’s extremely energetic research group, Academician G.H. von Wright and Academician Oiva Ketonen radiated uncompromising air of greatness to their environment, strengthened by the differences in their style and approach, personalities and priorities. Both Academicians were extremely important sources of inspiration for Esa, Ketonen becoming a close family friend. With great talets young and old around at the Department of Philosophy, the result was a liberally minded and creative, friendly and inspiring institution highly exceptional in its productivity by any standards.
Work
Helsingin yliopisto 1980 – 1993
Teknillinen korkeakoulu 2010-2010 Aalto-yliopisto 2010-2020
Family
Vaimo Pipsa Pallasvesa, kaksospojat Oliver & Jerome
Future
- Innostus jatkuu
- Uusia seminaareja
- The Book!
The Queen
After working in the 70’s in the tradition of analytic philosophy and philosophical logic, Esa moved in the 80’s to broader themes, to Sartre’s existentialism, philosophy of feminism, history of philosophy and philosophy of culture, writing groundbreaking books in Finnish on these themes.
Parallel to his broadening of range of interest in philosophy, Esa also became a media star in the 80’s in Finland. He domesticated the concept of a philosopher living a real life in real time through numerous appearances in the public media (tv, press and most radically at the time women’s magazines). He recorded a LP and published books with titles such as ”Erection on Albertstreet” (where he was living with his lady, the Queen), in addition to commenting all kinds of burning issues in the press. For most Finns, Esa was pretty much the only living philosopher they knew by name and apprearance.
Book collaborations
Esa’s interest in what he called ”Media Philosophy” found another platform in the book Imagologies: Media Philosophy, a major work he co-authored with Mark C. Taylor, one of America’s leading philosophers. The book came out 1994, went on to several printings, and stood out also because of its visual design. The highly innovative design was a groundbreaking work of Marjaana Virta, an acclaimed Finnish graphist. The design lead also to a product line with Marimekko. Each page of the book is different, a piece of art on its own, and designed to support the fragmented argument structure of the book as well as its content which sets out to outline an ambitious philosophy of the contemporary ”simcult” technological age. See Interview of Taylor on Imagologies. Look inside the book.
In 1990 Esa published the book Muutostekijä (Change agent) together with industrialist Ensio Miettinen, the founder of Ensto Companies. The innovative and highly unconventional industrialist was convinced that work life and business required a synthesis of the objective and the subjective world, the latter being the challenge. After reading Esa’s ”Erection on Albertstreet”, Ensio felt that he might be a guy worth collaborating with, given Esa’s bold, non-Iron Tower oriented style. This lead to another key turning point in Esa’s life – towards a growing interest in work life contexts, and to a desire to enhance people’s lifes via contributions to leadership, company culture and organizational behaviors.
Positive psychology & systems intelligence
Interest in organizations and leaderhip remains a key emphasis in Esa’s efforts. What he calls ”Positive Philosophical Practice”, ”Performative Philosophy” and ”Philosophy in Action and on the Fly” has been developed in lecture and seminar situations in companies and organizations. The urge to develop modes of philosophizing that would make a difference in the business world has been a chief emphasis for Esa since 1990. A major uplift in this realm has been the possibility to work closely with Nokia in the course of its astonishing rise in the 1990’s. See Interview with Nokia People Magazine. See the article Philosophical Lecturing as a Philosophical Practice
In 2000, Esa was invited to join the faculty at Helsinki University of Technology (Aalto University) where he has taught since then highly popular courses on Applied Philosophy, Philosophy of Life, and Systems Thinking. Esa’s appointment to Aalto University was an initiative of Professor Raimo P. Hämäläinen, a leading systems and decision theorist. With Raimo, Esa has developed the concept of Systems Intelligence, a chief notion to understand human behaviors from the kind of ”optimistic and realistic” viewpoint Esa prefers, and combining engineering thinking that seeks results with the humanistic tradition that sophisticates the sensibilities.
