Dr Vili Lähteenmäki
Dr Vili Lähteenmäki studies early modern accounts of the mind, consciousness, and self-knowledge. His research explores how thinkers such as René Descartes, John Locke, and Ralph Cudworth understood our awareness of ourselves and the world, and how their accounts of cognition connect with questions about how thought relates to its objects and what makes knowledge of ourselves and the world possible. He also occasionally works on the methodology of the history of philosophy, asking how we can recognise ways of thinking that differ from our own without forcing them into our own philosophical categories.
Dr Lähteenmäki received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Jyväskylä in 2009 and is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Oulu. Before joining Oulu in 2021, he held research and teaching positions at Jyväskylä and the University of Helsinki. He was an Academy of Finland Research Fellow from 2017 to 2022 and has been a visiting researcher at Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Queensland, and Harvard University. He led the Academy of Finland project Thick Subjects: A Reconsideration of Early Modern Views of the Self (2020–2025) and currently directs Epistemic Resilience and the Foundations of Cognition: A Study in Early Modern Philosophy (2026–2028).
During his Visiting Fellowship at Clare Hall, he will work on a monograph exploring the foundations of cognition and self-knowledge in early modern philosophy. The study examines how accounts of our knowledge of ourselves relate to accounts of our knowledge of the world, questioning the assumption that these constitute fundamentally separate domains of cognition.
Dr Lähteenmäki is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Modern Philosophy, Vice-President of the European Society for Early Modern Philosophy, and a board member of the Philosophical Society of Finland. He has co-edited several volumes on the history of philosophy of mind and co-organises the Finnish-Hungarian Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy.
Select publications
- “Locke’s Metaphysics of Cognition and Mental Operations.” In Locke’s ‘An Essay concerning Human Understanding’: A Critical Guide, edited by Matthew Leisinger. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
- “Self-Cognition and Ideas.” In The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy, edited by Stephen Howard and Jack Stetter. Edinburgh University Press, 2025.
- Cartesianism and Philosophy of Mind. Co-edited with Oberto Marrama and Jani Sinokki. Routledge, 2025.
- Mind and Obligation in the Long Middle Ages. Co-edited with Jari Kaukua and Juhana Toivanen. Brill, 2024.
- “Descartes on Subjects and Selves.” In The Self: A History, edited by Patricia Kitcher, 99–117. Oxford University Press, 2021.
- “Cudworth on Types of Consciousness.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18, no. 1 (2010): 9–34.
- “Subjectivity as a Non-textual Standard of Interpretation in the History of Philosophical Psychology.” With Jari Kaukua. History and Theory 49 (2010): 21–37.
- “Orders of Consciousness and Types of Reflexivity in Descartes.” In Consciousness: From Perception to Reflection in the History of Philosophy, edited by Sara Heinämaa, Vili Lähteenmäki, and Pauliina Remes, 177–202. Springer, 2007.
Select awards
- 2026 — Eudaimonia Institute research project grant, University of Oulu.
- 2020 — Academy of Finland research project grant.
- 2017 — Academy of Finland Research Fellowship.
- 2014 — “Cudworth on Types of Consciousness” selected among the highlights of the first 21 years of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.
Further links
https://www.oulu.fi/en/researchers/vili-lahteenmaki
