Dr. Tuomo Tiisala

Dr. Tuomo Tiisala

Postdoctoral UP Fellow

Period at the center: January 2023 - March 2024

Research Project: The Concept of Invisible Power

Email: tuomo.tiisala@icloud.com

Website

Tuomo works in social and political philosophy, from a perspective that is informed by the history of post-Kantian philosophy, especially by Michel Foucault. After earning his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2016 with a dissertation on Foucault, Tuomo was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at NYU’s philosophy department. He has also served at NYU Abu Dhabi as a visiting assistant professor of philosophy and at the University of Helsinki as a university lecturer in practical philosophy. Most recently, Tuomo was a senior fellow at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Research Project

The Concept of Invisible Power

The concept of power needs an update. In political philosophy, the concept of power is supposed to explain what threatens the freedom of individuals and communities, so that freedom can be defended. The current concept of power, however, is derived from early modern constitutional debates regarding the legitimacy of the state, which makes it inept to capture the new threats to freedom that have recently emerged in today’s world of global digital platforms. In the spirit of conceptual engineering, then, this project undertakes to revise the concept of power. The target concept must be both empirically illuminating and normatively relevant in today’s world. The strategy is to meet these criteria by focusing on power’s invisible mode of operation in the algorithmic design of digital platforms. The resultant concept of invisible power will equip future research to better identify and address the threats to freedom and democracy that arise from digital infrastructure.

Selected publications

Articles

“Normativity of Meaning: An Inferentialist Argument”. Synthese, forthcoming. Co-authored with Shuhei Shimamura.

“Revisable A Priori as A Political Problem: Critique of Constitution in Critical Theory”. Journal of Social and Political Philosophy, 2:2 (2023), 138-157. Co-authored with Sakari Säynäjoki.

“The Architectonic of Foucault’s Critique”. European Journal of Philosophy (2023). Online First: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ejop.12877. Co-authored with Daniele Lorenzini.

“Foucault, Neoliberalism, and Equality”. Critical Inquiry, 48:1 (Autumn 2021), 23-44.

“Overcoming ‘the Present Limits of the Necessary’: Foucault’s Conception of a Critique”. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 55:S1 (2017), 7-24.

“Keeping It Implicit: A Defense of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge”. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1:4 (2015), 653-73.