Let me start by warmly thanking the RCF for its decision to include our unit in its CoE program, as well as our two host institutions, University of Helsinki (Faculty of Theology) and Tampere University (Faculty of Social Sciences), both of which also support our project with considerable additional funding. We are excited to begin our research aiming at a critical transformation of our understanding of, and ways of responding to, one of the gravest problems defining the human condition – suffering.
Our work emerges from the recognition that the alarming experiences of hopelessness and “futurelessness” among the young, in particular, remind us that our societies, plagued by wars, a worsening climate crisis, and worries about the future of liberal democracy (among other things), desperately need philosophies of hope amidst the suffering around us. However, sincere hope must be based on a solid acknowledgment of the realities of the human condition and a critique of the illusory, and possibly dangerous, promises of naïve optimism. Given the fundamental significance of affliction as constitutive of our individual and social lives, it may be argued that the philosophy of suffering does not occupy an adequate place within philosophical research today. A radical reorientation of philosophical discourse itself – ethical inquiry in particular – is needed to fully account for the depth of the sense in which suffering and responses to suffering shape, and ought to shape, our conceptualization of reality in general.
It is precisely this reorientation that MePhiS seeks, arguing that philosophy must be reconstructed in our times. We will place suffering at the center of philosophical, and more generally humanistic or scholarly, reflection and offer a range of novel conceptual, argumentative, and interpretive tools for a deeper understanding of our engagement with affliction, starting from the meliorist (Lat. melior, better) idea that the world can and should be made better by means of active – albeit inevitably only piecemeal and often hardly visible – human efforts.
One of our main novelties is the way in which MePhiS will renew philosophical argumentation through its actively interdisciplinary research design, enriching its philosophical core in constant dialogue with the key fields of the humanities represented by our CoE, including systematic theology, history of ideas (especially history of ethics and legal history), literary studies, and empirical study of religion. Another distinctive characteristic of MePhiS is its critical attitude not only to devastating hopeless pessimism but also to widespread optimist assumptions. Realizing that we inevitably live within our human practices of “meaning-making” does not entail that the meaningfulness we project onto the world – particularly others’ experiences of affliction – is ethically acceptable. MePhiS will engage in critical humanistic research challenging what we call the “theodicist logic” of justifying suffering and demonstrating how this logic extends from the philosophy of religion (the traditional core area of the problem of suffering) to a wide range of entirely secular attempts to make sense of our lives and societies, as well as their complex, often horrendous, histories.
By arguing that embracing a meliorist stance, as a critical middle path between illusory optimism and nihilistic pessimism, is itself an ameliorative gesture potentially redefining our relation to the world we live in, we also hope to show that, and how, humanistic research matters. As a CoE, we primarily aim at scholarly excellence, recruiting a strong international team of academics at different career stages and planning a full range of scholarly outputs and activities, but we also, precisely by so doing, plan to add our small contribution to making the world better by developing an ethically more sustainable critical attitude to our discourses of suffering. The theoretical and the practical are, for us, deeply integrated.
Please find more information about the five research groups (work packages) of MePhiS on this website. You are warmly welcome to get in touch with us and to attend our upcoming academic events.
Helsinki, February 2026,
Sami Pihlström
Professor of Philosophy of Religion, University of Helsinki
Director of MePhiS