Virpi Mäkinen is PI and team leader of WP3, and deputy director of the MePhiS. She is a Senior University Lecturer in Theological and Social Ethics and holds the title of Docent in Theological Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Helsinki. Mäkinen has previously worked as a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow. She has recently directed the project At the Frontiers of Humanity: Extreme Necessity in the History of Ethics, Law, and Politics, 300–1600, funded by Research Council of Finland. Her main research areas are medieval and early modern moral, political, and legal thought, particularly within the Franciscan tradition and the School of Salamanca. She has discussed, e.g., the early development of subjective rights (especially. minority and necessity rights), poor relief, and social justice, in her publications such as, Property Rights in the Late Medieval Discussion on Franciscan Poverty, Transformations in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Rights Discourse, and Rights at the Margins: Historical, Legal, and Philosophical Perspectives. Currently she is co-editing the volume of Historicizing Crisis: Past Lessons for Modern Resilience. Mäkinen is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, Societas Ethica, and the Société Internationale pour L’Ètude de la Philosophie Médiévale. In MePhiS, she will continue to examine the right of necessity, expanding it to include not only famine but also war, political/civil resistance and non-human suffering.
Antti Taipale is an intellectual historian and post doctoral researcher in MePhiS WP3. His study focuses on early modern Europe and the British Isles in general and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in particular. The forms, purposes and audiences of religious rhetoric, especially in connection with warfare, have been his most prominent contributions to the field, with his latest publication Religious Instruction for Soldiers in the First English Civil War, 1642-1646, examining biblical rhetoric and arguments as tools of war.
In WP3, Taipale will survey afflictions inflicted by early modern warfare, such as violence, famine and pestilence. Above all, he will investigate not only different ways people used to console themselves to cope with suffering but also methods of improving the situation, insofar as these ideas were framed by - following or breaking of - religious, military, and natural laws.
Profile to be updated in 2026
Mats Nordström is a doctoral researcher with a background in the history of philosophy and philosophy more generally. He specialises in early modern philosophy, with emphasis on the thought of B. de Spinoza.
Nordström's doctoral research investigates how love and suffering intertwine within Spinoza's thought. A central question relates to whether Spinoza's conception of the highest human flourishing, blessedness, is compatible with an ethics of love that aims at alleviating the suffering of others.