Background
Kalla, Elno was born on August 9, 1890 in Alajärvi, Finland. <f:31 July 1958. Helsinki.
Philosopher of science theorist of knowledge
Kalla, Elno was born on August 9, 1890 in Alajärvi, Finland. <f:31 July 1958. Helsinki.
PhD, University of Helsinki, 1916. Docent of Psychology, University of Helsinki, 1919.
1921-1930, Professor of Philosophy, Turku University. 1930-1948, Professor of Philosophy, Helsinki. 1948, Member of Finland's Academy.
Kaila's first book was influenced by Gestalt psychology. Later, he worked mostly in the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science. He became influenced by the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and wrote several works in the spirit of this philosophy, including his popular book on what knowledge is and what it is not (1939). The central idea in the latter book is that all human cognition is characterized by a search for invariances, lawlike uniformities. From this point of view he traces the development of sciences from antiquity to Galileo to modern times, outlines the logical empiricist views on formal and empirical truth, and defends the deductive-nomological model of explanation. The last ten years of his life he spent studying problems in the philosophy of science arising from the most recent discoveries in physics, especially quantum mechanics. During this period he modified his previous logical empiricist views and returned to a kind of holism. He claimed that the earlier mechanistic and deterministic approach in physics had to be abandoned and replaced by a kind of fieldtheoretical or holistic approach considering each individual phenomenon as a function of a totahtyHe also claimed that processes are not always in their entirety determined by the initial conditions. Kaila spoke of ‘terminal causality’ in contrast to ‘initial causality’. The dialogue Tankens oro (1944) was concerned with problems of natural philosophy and worldview.