Dr Mika Perälä

Mika Perälä is Adjunct Professor of Theoretical Philosophy (Title of Docent) at the University of Helsinki. He is currently editing with Henrik Lagerlund (Stockholm) two books, Aristotelian Induction and The Reception of Aristotelian Induction, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.

Dr Perälä’s research interests are in ancient philosophy, history of logic, epistemology and philosophy of education. He has a special interest in Aristotle’s philosophy, the Aristotelian tradition and the way of doing philosophy in an Aristotelian manner, in which philosophy and other fields of research, including empirical science, are not contrasted but rather seen as supporting each other. During his visit to Clare Hall, he is conducting research on Aristotle’s approach to ethics, in particular the way in which Aristotle acquires the starting points of ethics as well as his understanding of virtues in terms of dynamis and krisis.

Dr Perälä has studied classics and philosophy at the universities of Helsinki and Oxford. After obtaining his doctorate at the University of Helsinki with a thesis on Aristotle’s theory of perception in 2010, he has pursued an Academy of Finland post-doctoral project in Helsinki, held fixed-term University Lectureships in Helsinki and Jyväskylä and paid research visits to the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (Uppsala) and the University of Gothenburg. He is a full member of the Finnish Matriculation Examination Board (2019–2024). Most recently, he has edited with Marke Ahonen and Ville Vuolanto a book in Finnish titled Antiikki ja me that addresses the question of why classics matters – even in Finland.

At Clare Hall, Mika is accompanied by his wife, Dr Saija Isomaa, Senior Lecturer in Finnish Literature at the University of Tampere – an expert on theory and practice of historical poetics, genre theory, and literary history (https://researchportal.tuni.fi/fi/persons/saija-isomaa).