Simo Knuuttila (1946â2022) in memoriam
Our friend and colleague Simo Knuuttila died on the night of 16Â June 2022.*
Simo was born in Peräseinäjoki on 8 May 1946. It is a small town about 300â¯km north-west of Helsinki in Western Finland.
He had a quiet, deliberate and careful way of speaking. As with many Finns, he was reserved and it took time to get close to him. But, as the photo shows, he had a very puckish sense of humour.
He is clearly fondly remembered by many younger scholars, who have spoken highly in the past week on social media of his warmth and support. He studied under the Greek philologist Holger Thesleff and the philosopher and logician Jaakko Hintikka, and subsequently was himself very influential in the study in Finland of the history of philosophy. He was Professor of Theological Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Helsinki from 1981 till 2014, and subsequently Professor Emeritus. He was made a member of the Finnish Academy of Science in 1988.
Simo received the Gad Rausing Prize for Outstanding Humanistic Research from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in 2008, and was awarded the Finnish Science Prize in 2011.
I believe Simoâs first European Symposium for Medieval Logic and Semantics (ESMLS) meeting was the 7th Symposium in Poitiers in 1985, where I met him and where he talked about possibility and necessity in Gilbert of Poitiers. At the next ESMLS, the 8th, in Freiburg-im-Breisgau in 1988, Simo gave a talk on practical argumentation and deontic logic in the Middle Ages. He subsequently became a regular at our meetings, including the 9th Symposium that I organised in St Andrews in 1990, where his talk was about trinitarian sophisms in Robert Holcotâs theology, such as: âThis divine essence is the father, this divine essence is the son, so the father is the son.â
I first got to know Simo properly at the next meeting, held in Nijmegen in 1992, when we both stayed on for a while after the conference. When I was visiting Helsinki some years later (in connection with the preparation of the volume on The Development of Modern Logic, edited by Leila Haaparanta), he was kind enough to invite me to dinner at his apartment down in the dockland area and to meet his wife Marja-Liisa.
I last saw Simo at a small workshop in Stockholm in April 2019 on âMedieval Modal Logicâ organised by Henrik Lagerlund, where Simo talked about the necessity of the present and âwhat always isâ in medieval logical treatises.
Colleagues will know at least one of his two most substantial publications: Modalities in Medieval Philosophy, published in 1993 and building on those papers at the European Symposium from 1985, 1988, and 1990. It is particularly relevant to this conference, of course, where Simo was indeed due to give a talk. Some of us may also know his other book, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 2004. But Simo was also very active in editing collections of articles, notably Reforging the Great Chain of Being, The Logic of Being, and Modern Modalities, in publishing papers of his own and in writing very many of the survey articles on modality in medieval philosophy.
The thesis of Modalities in Medieval Philosophy is that a diachronic conception of modality, universally held in various forms in ancient authors (in particular, the statistical, or temporal frequency, interpretation), was transformed in the Middle Ages into a synchronic conception more akin to the notion of possibility and necessity as truth in some or all possible worlds now dominant in current thinking. Iâm sure there will be very many references and allusions to Simoâs work throughout this weekâs conference, and that his work will underpin our discussions even when not explicitly referenced.
Simo was much admired by all who knew him, enjoying his wicked sense of humour but also his breadth of knowledge and depth of understanding. He will be missed by all of us, those who remember him personally and also those who perhaps never had the chance to meet him but know him through his publications. We send our condolences to his widow, Marja-Liisa, and son Kyösti.
Stephen Read
Warsaw, 27Â June 2022
This appreciation in memoriam was presented at the start of the Symposium.