Common Good and Self-Interest in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy

Heikki Haara, is University Lecturer in Political history at the University of Helsinki. His primary research interest has been theories of human nature and their relationship to moral and political thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has been a visiting researcher at the universities of California, Berkeley and Oxford and Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. He is the author of Pufendorf’s Theory of Sociability: Passions, Habits and Social Order (Springer, 2018) and the editor of Rights at the Margins: Historical, Philosophical and Legal Perspectives (Brill, 2020) and Passions, Politics and the Limits of Society (de Gruyter, 2020).

Juhana Toivanen is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He has published widely on medieval philosophical psychology, medieval conceptions of animals, and political philosophy. His major publications include the monographs Perception and the Internal Senses (Brill, 2013) and The Political Animal in Medieval Philosophy (Brill, 2021). In addition, he has published more than fifty journal articles and book chapters. Currently he is working on social and political dimensions of moral vices in late medieval philosophy, focusing mainly on commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics from ca. 1250-1600.