MePhiS Director and team leader of WP1 Sami Pihlström is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki. He has previously served as Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, as the Director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, as the Chair of the Research Council of Culture and Society at the Academy of Finland / Research Council of Finland, and as the President of the Philosophical Society of Finland. He has published widely on pragmatism, realism, transcendental philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion, and related topics. Many of his recent works explore issues close to the research topics of MePhiS, e.g., Pragmatist Truth in the Post-Truth Age: Normativity, Sincerity, and Humanism (2021), Humanism, Antitheodicism, and the Critique of Meaning in Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion (2023), “The Unthinkable” in Ethics, History, and Philosophical Anthropology (2025), and Advanced Introduction to Antitheodicy (2026). He is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, Academia Europaea, and Institut International de Philosophie, as well as a steering committee member of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies.
Within MePhiS and its WP1, Pihlström continues to examine pragmatist and transcendental methodologies in developing an antitheodicist approach to the problem of suffering, with special focus on the conceptual relation between antitheodicy and meliorism. Interpretations of historical thinkers relevant to meliorism – not only philosophers explicitly subscribing to meliorism, such as the classical pragmatists, but also Enlightenment figures like Kant – are an important element of this research.
Profile to be updated in 2026
Profile to be updated in 2026
Profile to be updated in 2026
Henrik Rydenfelt is University Researcher in the project Secular Theodicies - Pragmatist Critique, and Docent of practical philosophy and media and communication studies at the University of Helsinki. His recent research projects develop along two closely connected strands. The first advances a pragmatist methodology for examining ethical and socio-political questions. Drawing on philosophy of science, ethics, and political philosophy, this work challenges sharp distinctions between empirical and normative study. The second strand applies this approach in the study of the ethical and societal issues of generative AI, particularly in the context of media and journalism.
Within MePhiS, Rydenfelt develops a meliorist methodology of normative inquiry and critically analyses “theodicist” narratives that frame the harms of emerging technologies as necessary trade-offs of progress.
Lauri Snellman is post-doctoral researcher at the Secular Theodicies project. He wrote his ThD thesis Evil and Intelligibility on the metacritique of the problem of evil. He studied the presuppositions of the problem of evil as a means to look into interesting topics like philosophical methodology, philosophical logic, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, the critique of reason and Biblical theology. He has also researched the logic of world-views at the Universities of Uppsala and Helsinki. He has published the Essay on the Logic of World-views on the topic of world-views.
Snellman's work at the Secular Theodicies project brings together the problems of evil, intelligibility and the logic of world-views. Currently he's working on a logical analysis of secular theodicies. He also uses the conceptual tools from the logic of world-views to describe ways of finding meaning in the world. Snellman is developing ways of describing and assessing the ways different world-views come to terms with evil. He's also interested in dispositions and habits in pragmatism, which could offer a foundation for meliorist philosophy.
Professor Risto Saarinen's expertise focuses on the history of philosophy and theology in the Western tradition. Contemporary discussions on gift and recognition and the dialogue between religious convictions continue to interest him. As senior advisor of MePhis, his role is supportive rather than committed to realizing a particular agenda. Saarinen intends to work on the practices of consolation and the understanding of "burdens" as the negative counterparts of gifts.