Author: cful

Moral Credit, Skill, and Virtue

David Horst (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul)

21 April 2023, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Someone acts in a morally worthy way when they deserve credit for doing the morally right thing. But when and why do agents deserve credit for the success involved in doing the right thing? It is tempting to seek an answer to this question by drawing an analogy with creditworthy success in other domains of human agency, especially in sports, arts, and crafts. Accordingly, some authors have recently argued that, just like creditworthy success in, say, chess, piano playing, or archery, creditworthy moral success is a matter of getting things right by way of manifesting a relevant skill. My main aim in this talk is to bring out an important structural difference between moral creditworthiness and creditworthiness in sports, arts, and craft, undermining attempts to use examples of the latter as a model for understanding the former.

Goethe’s Theory of Colour and the Philosophy of Science

Oliver Passon (University of Wuppertal)

14 April 2023, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Surprisingly, the famous German poet and writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) considered his scientific work as more important than his literary work. However, neither his contemporaries nor posterity shared this view and especially his criticism of Newton led to Goethe’s discredit. In this lecture, I argue that Goethe’s contributions deserve to be reassessed from both a scientific and philosophical perspective.

Enzo Rossi

University of Amsterdam

The Hobgoblin of Moralist Minds

11 April 2023, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

In this paper I put forward an argument against political moralism—the view that the primary task of political philosophy is to render moral judgments about politics. I focus on the currently predominant form of moralism in Anglophone political philosophy, which renders such judgments by drawing controversial conclusions from widely shared moral commitments. The argument questions the value of seeking consistency between one’s moral commitments, intuitions, and judgments, which is a central desideratum of most moralist approaches. I contend that, in politics, the specific form of consistency sought by philosophers yields virtually no motivational or practical advantage over inconsistency. The only good reason to seek this type of consistency, then, would be if we had sufficient indication that our moral premises are true or justified; but moralists typically seek to bracket these sorts of metaethical questions, and not without reason. Besides, consistency is not a requirement of rationality when it concerns claims that lack epistemic warrant. And so much political moralism ends up looking like a gratuitous intellectual exercise. The upshot is that ordinary practice of making moral judgments about politics does not merit a philosophical extension—unlike the way in which the ordinary practice of making empirical observations merits extension into science, or naturalised philosophy. This argument provides indirect support for certain forms of realism in normative political theory. On these realist approaches normative political judgments should draw exclusively or primarily from non-moral sources of normativity, such as epistemic normativity, prudential normativity, and other options, so as to derive evaluative (but not prescriptive) judgments from social-scientific descriptions of reality.

Cognitive Synonymy: a Dead Parrot?

Francesco Berto (University of St Andrews)

(joint work with Levin Hornischer, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)

31 March 2023, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Sentences φ and ψ are cognitive synonyms for one when they play the same role in one’s cognitive life: what one understands given either, one does, given the other; what one concludes (deductively, abductively, inductively, etc.) supposing either, one does, supposing the other; one would revise one’s beliefs in the same way after learning either; etc. The notion is pervasive in linguistic and philosophical semantics, cogpsi, and AI – but elusive: it’s bound to be hyperintensional, but excessive fine-graining, e.g., by indiscriminate use of ‘open’ impossible worlds, would trivialize it and there are independent reasons for some coarse-graining. It should be sensitive to subject matters and conceptual limitations, but this stands in the way of a natural algebra: even non-distributive or non-modular lattices won’t do. Besides, a cognitively adequate individuation of content may be intransitive due to ‘dead parrot’ series (yeah the Monty Python are involved!): sequences φ1, …, φn where adjacent φi,φj are cognitive synonyms for one while φ1 and φn are not. But finding an intransitive account is hard: Fregean equipollence won’t do and an impossibility result by Leitgeb shows that it wouldn’t satisfy a minimal compositionality principle. Sed contra, there are reasons for transitivity, too (from substitutivity salva veritate, non-mononotonicity, and uniformity principles). In spite of this mess, we come up with a formal semantics capturing this whole jumble of desiderata, thereby giving evidence that the notion is coherent. We then re-assess dead parrot cases in its light.

Katja Diefenbach

European University Viadrina

Unemployed positivity. Deleuze and Agamben as readers of Spinoza

28 March 2023, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

Referring to Bataille’s figure of unemployed negativity, Agamben develops a theory of the autonomy of impotentiality or non-doing. It is based on the idea that the possible is not determined by its actualization, but rather by the capacity of not doing something or of not thinking something, by deactivation or becoming inoperative. By explaining that all potentiality is impotentiality and all capacity essentially passivity, Agamben follows Heidegger’s interpretation of the first sections of the ninth book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In a formidable short-circuit, he relates this interpretation to Spinoza’s notion of potentiality in the Ethics understood, in the same uncanonical way, as self-contentment, Sabbath and inaction. The lecture discusses the extent to which Deleuze’s vitalist reading of Spinoza contradicts Agamben’s perspective point by point and arrives at a different notion of politics and resistance.

A Problem for Greco’s Anti-Reductionism

Nuno Venturinha (IFILNOVA, New University of Lisbon)

24 March 2023, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: In his most recent work, culminating in The Transmission of Knowledge, John Greco adopts a new epistemological perspective, arguing that knowledge transmission cannot be viewed as reducible to knowledge generation. The purpose of Greco’s “anti-reductionist theory of knowledge transmission” is not simply to specify that there are two irreducible “ways of coming to know”. Rather, Greco sets out to formulate a unified virtue-theoretic account of generative and transmissive knowledge. But while his framework convincingly addresses the individualism objection often levelled against virtue epistemology, it problematically incorporates a third kind of knowledge, that of “common knowledge” or “hinge knowledge”, which shares the property of irreducibility with generated and transmitted knowledge. In this paper, I will discuss the all-pervasive and inescapable nature of hinge commitments, raising difficulties for the anti-reductionism that characterizes Greco’s “unified epistemology of generated, transmitted, and hinge knowledge”. If the latter is to be understood in terms of procedural knowledge or “tacit knowledge that is constitutive of cognitive virtue”, as Greco suggests, then it seems hard to escape the conclusion that both generated and transmitted knowledge are ultimately reducible to hinge knowledge.

Hélder Telo

University of Beira Interior

Cuidado e Verdade na Ética: Um Diálogo entre Platão, Heidegger e Foucault

21 March 2023, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

O cuidado e a verdade podem facilmente ser pensados como sendo apenas capítulos especiais e separados da ética. Nesse caso, eles estariam associados a alguns deveres, sobretudo na relação com outros, mas não estariam profundamente interligados e não teriam impacto profundo na compreensão da própria ética. No entanto, são vários os autores que apontam para uma conexão profunda entre a esfera da ética (entendida num sentido ora mais estrito, ora mais lato), o cuidado e a verdade. O objetivo desta apresentação é delimitar um campo de pesquisa desta conexão profunda com especial foco nas discussões de Platão, Heidegger e Foucault. Para isso, começar-se-á por considerar os diferentes modos como estes três autores pensam o cuidado de si e de outros como algo que depende do desenvolvimento da relação com a verdade e, ao mesmo tempo, concebem a relação com a verdade como algo que se constitui ou desenvolve por meio do cuidado. Com base nisso, refletir-se-á então sobre algumas das implicações éticas dessa conexão e como ela pode ocupar um papel central na própria ética.

Graded Properties

Claudio Calosi (University of Geneva) & Robert Michels (LanCog, University of Lisbon)

17 March 2023, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: The idea that properties can be had partly or to a certain degree is controversial, but also has a considerable pedigree among philosophers and scientists who either embrace or at least hint at an ontology of graded properties. In this paper, we first aim to show that metaphysical sense can be made of this idea by proposing a partial taxonomy of metaphysical accounts of graded properties, focusing on three particular approaches: one which explicates having a property to a degree in terms of having a property with an in-built degree, another based on the idea that instantiation admits of degrees, and a third which derives the degree to which properties are had from the aspects of multi-dimensional properties. Our second aim is to demonstrate that the choice between these account can make a substantial metaphysical difference by way of a number of case studies.

The Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon invites to submit abstracts for contributed talks to be presented at the international conference Open Topics in Philosophy of Physics. The conference will take place from Monday 12 to Wednesday 14 of June 2023 and will discuss a variety of open topics in the foundations, philosophy and metaphysics of physics, with a special focus on quantum mechanics, philosophy of space-time and statistical mechanics.

Invited speakers: Craig Callender (San Diego), Elena Castellani (Florence), Mario Hubert (American University of Cairo), Emilia Margoni (Florence & Geneva), Andrea Oldofredi (Lisbon), Patricia Palacios (Salzburg), Bryan Roberts (LSE), Giovanni Valente (Polytechnic University of Milan), Alastair Wilson (Birmingham), David Yates (Lisbon).

Call for abstracts

Submissions of proposals for contributed talks should address a relevant topic within the foundations, philosophy or metaphysics of physics, broadly conceived. Examples of topics which are of interest for the conference are (but not limited to) the following:

• Foundations and philosophy of quantum mechanics
• Metaphysics of quantum mechanics
• Interpretation and open problems in quantum field theory
• Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics
• Time’s arrow and the nature of time in physics
• Philosophy of space-time (general relativity, quantum gravity)

Submissions from PhD students, early postdocs and young researchers are especially welcome. Each contributed talk will be allocated a slot of 30 minutes, including discussion.

Submission procedure

Abstracts of maximum 600 words (including bibliography) should be submitted through the following submission link

• The deadline for submitting the abstracts is April 10th, 2023.
• The notification of acceptance for the selected contributed talks will be communicated by April 30th, 2023.

For any information or further queries about the conference, please contact the organizer (Davide Romano) at the following email address: davide.romano@edu.ulisboa.pt

Updated information about the conference can be found at the following conference website.
PhilEvents webpage

Dirk Michael Hennrich

Praxis-CFUL, University of Lisbon

The Hyperbolic Realm of Violence. Remarks on Benjamin, Fanon, and Arendt Today

14 March 2023, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

Violence, in its many expressions and manifestations, continually cuts through our existence. As social and political beings, the central powers that influence our everyday life are, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, the violence that establishes the law and the violence that preserves the law, which can only be replaced by pure and divine anarchic violence. Frantz Fanon, in the wake of colonial violence and strongly influenced by Georges Sorel, sees the need for radical violence in the decolonial process. The relationship of colonial violence with decolonial violence must be reciprocal until victory, yet the war continues after the liberation of other future-generating forms in the people and for the people and, so to speak, as the ongoing struggle for utopia. Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, explores her concept of violence not in opposition to law but in relation to power, as a response to the student movements of the 1960s. Incredible parallels can be drawn to the present, such as the response to structural and systemic violence in universities and the response to the predatory violence of states and industrial conglomerates against the Earth’s biosphere. The present attempt consists of a further approach in which the various forms of violence are divided into: i) one that unifies, ii) one that separates, and iii) one that exaggerates, that transgresses the measure, which, as Benjamin showed, intervenes and disintegrates social and moral relations. Using ancient Greek terms, a distinction is made between symbolic violence, diabolical violence and hyperbolic violence, with the aim of bestowing hyperbolic violence the seal of the present. The questions to be resolved are numerous, but first it will be important to distinguish and describe the three aforementioned forms of violence to understand how the dominant one of our present can be recognised and countered in the process of a certain decolonisation of thought.