Dr. Arvi-Antti Erik Särkelä

Arvi Särkelä is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the ETH. He studied sociology, philosophy, economics and journalism at the University of Helsinki, Finland, finishing his BA with the highest rank 2010. He studied political theory at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, 2008-2010. He graduated with the highest rank with an MA thesis supervised by Axel Honneth on Dewey's philosophy of struggles for recognition between social groups. He then pursued a PhD in philosophy at Frankfurt working simultaneously at the Institute for Social Research (IfS) where he coordinated the Internationaler Arbeitskreis für Kritische Theorie. During his PhD studies, he visited Columbia University in the fall term of 2012. Supervised by Axel Honneth and Arto Laitinen, he submitted his doctoral dissertation on Hegel, Dewey and immanent critique in January 2016; it was awarded summa cum laude. He worked as Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher (Oberassistent) at the University of Lucerne from 2016 to 2022. There he was granted, with Martin Hartmann, the SNSF Project "A Diagnosis of Social Pathologies? Variations of Naturalism in Social Philosophy" for 2017-2020. At Lucerne, he taught 24 different courses in social philosophy, philosophy of culture, ethics and aesthetics; built an MA program of Philosophy, Politics and Economics; and supervised around 40 BA and MA theses. He was granted the Title of Docent (Finnish habilitation equivalent) at Tampere University, Finland, in April 2019. He spent the spring term of 2020 on research leave at Université de Paris Nanterre (SNSF Scientific Exchanges, hosted by Emmanuel Renault). In the fall of 2022, he and Michael Hampe were granted the SNSF Project "The Gestures of Philosophy: Showing Philosophy 1920-1970," on which he focuses his current research. He spent the spring term 2023 on research leave in the von Wright-Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki. In February 2024, he finished his habilitation with venia legendi in philosophy at the University of Lucerne. 

In research, Arvi Särkelä focuses on social philosophy, philosophy of culture, philosophy of nature, ethics, aesthetics and the history of philosophy. He has published many articles on Dewey, Adorno, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Emerson and Freud; on Critical Theory, Pragmatism, German Idealism, (Post-)Analytic Philosophy, and Naturalism; and on the idea of social pathology. He is the author of the book Immanente Kritik und soziales Leben: Selbsttransformative Praxis nach Hegel und Dewey (Klostermann 2018). Together with Axel Honneth, he co-edited the German edition of John Dewey's lectures in china on social philosophy: John Dewey, Sozialphilosophie: Vorlesungen in China 1919/20 (Suhrkamp 2019). He also co-edited, with Martin Hartmann, the book Naturalism and Social Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield 2023). He has also co-edited special issues on Dewey and on recognition theory. He is one of the authors of "Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto" (Krisis 2022, www.criticalnaturalism.comcall_made). He is a regular columnist for the monthly Ny Tid. He has recently finished a monograph on disclosing critique with the working title Vicious Circles: Adaptation, Exemplarity, and Disclosing Critique of Society. It seeks to disclose a practice of philosophical social critique by telling the story of a critical metaphor, "drawing a circle around a circle," from Emerson via Nietzsche, Dewey and Freud to Adorno.