ABSTRACT
Timo Airaksinen (PhD Turku University, Finland 1975) has been a full professor of Ethics and Social Philosophy, University of Helsinki, Finland, since 1981. He is vice president of the Philosophical Society of Finland and the International Berkeley Society. He is a managing editor of the journal Hobbes Studies (Brill). He has written The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade (Routledge 1995), The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft (Lang 1998), and The Ethics of Coercion and Authority (University of Pittsburgh Press 1988). He has also written high school and university textbooks on philosophy and nonreligious moral education. He has written popular books in Finnish on happiness, quality of life, madness, and other topics. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Praxiology series within which he coedited with W. Gasparski Practical Philosophy and Action Theory (Transaction 1993) and Praxiology and the Philosophy of Technology (Transaction 2008). He is a Life Honorary Member of the Learned Society of Praxiology. His research interests include happiness, individual safety/security, trust, and secrets, mainly from the point of view of justice and social power. He is currently writing a book on needs, desires, and happiness. He has been lecturing in professional ethics for a long time and has written international encyclopedia articles on this topic. He has spent several research periods at the Dept. of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, and the Center for Philosophy of Science, Pittsburgh, working with Dr. Nicholas Rescher. He was a visiting professor at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, TX, 1994–1996. He is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
