Alumni of the Month: Walter Rech and Friedrich Stadler

I am Research Professor of Legal Philosophy and Legal Theory at Tallinn University. My work is interdisciplinary, situated at the intersection of the fields of law, philosophy, history, and politics. 

My research has covered diverse topics, including the role of the concept of an ‘enemy of mankind’ in international law and international politics, the use of historical narratives in legal and political discourse, the notion of indirect aggression in the NATO context, and the practice of ‘targeted killing’ as a tool of warfare. My Collegium project centred on the dilemmas of targeted killing from the viewpoint of international law. It resulted in publications such as  with the London Review of International Law and “Should Heads of State and Government Enjoy Protection from Direct Attack in Armed Conflict?” with the Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie.

My experience at the Collegium was not only productive but also truly rewarding in both professional and personal terms. It condensed what in my view are the most inspiring components of academic life today: intellectual ambition, internationalization, and interdisciplinarity, all of which refer to the possibility of crossing boundaries and questioning entrenched academic assumptions. The Collegium gives its fellows the opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research in a uniquely stimulating and open environment; it allows looking beyond familiar horizons and conventions. 

One of the highlights of the Collegium’s academic year are the symposia organised by Core Fellows and gathering top-level experts in various academic fields. During my time at the Collegium, Lilian O’Brien, Svetlana Vetchinnikova, and I organized a Collegium symposium on , facilitating new collaborations between scholars in philosophy, linguistics, law, history, and social and political sciences. 

I very much enjoyed the weekly HCAS seminars during which scholars would exchange fruitful ideas and challenge speakers through questions that moved across disciplines. I also appreciated the conviviality of the Collegium and how it made everyone feel at home. As with every institution, the excellence of the Collegium rests on the excellence and quality of the people and staff who inhabit and run it at a given point in time. The Collegium staff deserves praise for running the institution in a way that genuinely fosters first-class research and academic freedom.

When I was invited by the then director of HCAS, Juha Sihvola, to apply for a position as a research fellow in 2006, I was delighted for several reasons. Firstly, since the founding of the Vienna Circle Institute in 1991, I had already established good personal and academic contacts with several Finnish colleagues. Secondly, since my research on the Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism, I had also become familiar with the impact and spread of Viennese philosophy in the Nordic countries, which I then proposed as a research project in Helsinki. 

My fellowship at HCAS took place in 2006–2007. As my colleague Juha Manninen (1945–2023) also was there at the time, we had an excellent opportunity to work together. We organized the international conference “Networks and Transformations of Logical Empiricism” at HCAS in September 2007 and edited the results in book form under the title . In it, I wrote about Arne Naess, whom I visited in Oslo for the last time during my stay in Helsinki. This volume was presented at HCAS in 2010 under the new director Sami Pihlström, with whom I was pleased to establish a research network entitled “Science, Culture, and Society”. The network organized a series of conferences in Helsinki, Tübingen, and Vienna, which also resulted in . 

Soon after my fellowship, in 2008, I was appointed Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Vienna. Yet, my contacts in Helsinki led to further activities there, e.g., as an “opponent” for several doctoral candidates in philosophy, as well as president of the European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA), which, with the help of my colleague Matti Sintonen, held one of its biennial conferences at the University of Helsinki in 2013. Later I served as a member of evaluation panels at the Research Council of Finland and the Åbo Akademi University in Turku, and in 2019 I participated in a conference on Gödel organized by Jan von Plato. 

Incidentally, it should be mentioned that I also met Martin Kusch for the first time in person at HCAS. He later became my colleague at the Department of Philosophy, where Tarja Knuuttila – a former fellow at HCAS – succeeded me as professor. And I also met my old friend Gereon Wolters from Konstanz, also an HCAS fellow.

In 2023, I felt honored being invited by the Philosophical Society of Finland to deliver the prestigious Georg Henrik von Wright Lecture, which has been published in the series . Finally, it was a personal concern of mine to publish parts of a planned book by Juha Manninen on Waismann, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle with primary sources, in , which Juha unfortunately did not live to see published.

During my stay in Helsinki, I really enjoyed the break from my academic obligations in Vienna and was able to concentrate on my research. At the same time, my family and I got to know the beautiful city of Helsinki better, which has since become a kind of second home for us. Looking back, my stay at HCAS was a personally and academically enjoyable and productive episode that continues to have an impact today, with fond memories and nostalgic reflections that I would not want to miss. If there is such a thing as intellectual sustainability, then my “Nordic connection” in Helsinki is a good example of it!