Lilian O’Brien
Lilian O’Brien received a PhD in Philosophy from Brown University. Most of her current work deals with issues in the philosophy of agency. Her project at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies – The Committed Mind – concerns the nature of commitment. She is also very interested in the nature of intentional action and in self- and other-understanding in action contexts. Her work has appeared in Philosophical Issues, The Philosophical Quarterly, Analysis, Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Agency, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a second edition of her Philosophy of Action (Palgrave-MacMillan 2014).
Walter Rech
Walter works at the intersection of international law, history and philosophy, and his research focuses on issues of war and security. He is especially interested in the interaction between legal and political languages, structures and actors, for instance in how legal vocabularies restrain or allow specific forms of conflict and thereby legitimize or delegitimize certain political players. Among Walter’s publications is the monograph Enemies of Mankind: Vattel’s Theory of Collective Security, Brill 2013. Walter has previously worked as a project coordinator and postdoctoral researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights after earning his PhD from the University of Melbourne. He has work experience in regulatory agencies and financial services.
Svetlana Vetchinnikova
Svetlana Vetchinnikova obtained her PhD in English Linguistics at the University of Helsinki in 2014. Currently, she is Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies working on chunking and individual variation using corpus linguistic and behavioural data. She is author of Phraseology and the Advanced Language Learner (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and co-editor of Changing English (De Gruyter, 2017) and Language Change: The impact of English as a lingua franca (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Note from the organizers: We would like to thank Kaisa Kaakinen, Oscar Ahlberg and Anna Konijn for their immense help in organizing the symposium and Pavel Kaltygin for creating the visual images.