Author: cful

Necessary in the Highest Degree — Whatever That Means

Cian Dorr (New York University)

21 March 2025, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão [C201.J] (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: There are many reasons to think that the ‘necessity’ in the title and topic of Naming and Necessity is intended to be understood as minimally inclusive, in the sense that whenever it is necessary (tout court) that something is the case, it is also necessary in every other way that it is the case. It is also clear that Kripke believes he has identified a powerful and general technique for arguing for claims of necessity, by appealing to the necessity of identity—a technique that can be applied not just to identities involving proper names, but to “theoretical identifications”, thereby establishing necessity tout court for many facts that Kripke’s immediate predecessors would have classified as merely nomically necessary. But many authors find the modal claims supported by this technique so implausible when ‘necessary’ is read as minimally inclusive that they reject the straightforward interpretation of Kripke as intending such a reading.

            In this talk, I will defend both the straightforward interpretation and the claim that his argumentative technique really does have the power and generality that Kripke attributes to it, for “theoretical identifications” as well as identities involving proper names. My initial focus will be on property identities like ‘The property of being made of gold is the property of being composed of atoms with 79 protons’, as well as related infinitival identities, like ‘To be made of gold is to be composed of atoms with 79 protons’. I will argue that such sentences are plausibly true and support attributions of necessity, even on a minimally inclusive reading of ‘necessary’. This requires rebutting views that either reject such identities, or reject the validity of substituting them into the necessity of identity, on the grounds that this implies false claims involving propositional attitudes such as ‘Everyone who knows that something is made of gold knows that it is composed of atoms with 79 protons’. In response to the proponents of such views, I will sketch a view of speech and attitude verbs as semantically ill-behaved (in a way somewhat reminiscent of quotation). Finally, I will argue that although Kripke’s paradigm “theoretical identifications”—sentences like ‘Water is H₂O’ and ‘Heat is molecular motion’—have readings on which they are not identities of any sort, they also admit readings as equivalent to corresponding infinitival identities (e.g., ‘To be water is to be H₂O’), and are thus equally capable of playing the relevant argumentative role.

This work/event is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the project UID/00310/2025, Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa
(https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00310/2025)

The Guise of the Rewarding

Jeremy Pober (LanCog, University of Lisbon)

14 March 2025, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão [C201.J] (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Among empirically sensitive theories of desire, a prominent strain (Arpaly and Schroeder 2014; Schroeder 2004; Pober forthcoming) defines desire in terms of ‘reward’, where ‘reward’ is a technical term derived from its use in the psychology of decision-making. Per these Reward Theories, desires are realized in states of the reward learning system. This system records and constantly updates the reward value of various objects an agent/organism encounters, such that the more rewarding an object type, the more, ceteris paribus, the agent/organism is disposed to behave in ways that support obtaining it. Meanwhile, among other theories of desire, representational, or ‘guise of the good’ theories claim the defining characteristic of desires is that they represent their objects as good in some way. The most influential strain take the vehicle of the representation to be a quasi-perceptual state (Oddie 2005; Tenenbaum 2007). I propose that these two families of views can be fruitfully combined. The core idea is that ‘rewarding’ is understood as a sort of evaluation of goodness, in particular a subjective valuation (Levy and Glimcher 2012), and, in turn, the reward learning system is the vehicle of the evaluations that constitute desire. The resulting ‘Guise of the Rewarding’ view has, I shall argue, advantages over each of its constituents.

Aaron Schuster

Independent Researcher

Involuntary Insubordination and the Borderland between Loneliness and Community: Kafka and Psychoanalysis

18 March 2025, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

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

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

In one of his diary entries, Franz Kafka writes of “the borderland between loneliness and community.” I will argue that this borderland is precisely the domain of psychoanalysis, and that Kafka’s line provides a compelling formulation of what is at stake in the psychoanalytic view of the human being. Humans are creatures of the border, caught between sheer isolation and worldlessness, on the one hand, and their belonging to the community and insertion into the socio-symbolic order, on the other. Symptoms should be conceived as “solutions” that a person (unconsciously) invents for problems that the wider community cannot solve. They save the person from total isolation—from helplessly drowning in their problems—while at the same disconnecting them from the codes and frameworks that organize shared social life. This talk will explore how this borderland forces a reconsideration of freedom. The opposition between autonomy and heteronomy is complicated by voluntary servitude, defined as a willing of unfreedom or an autonomous affirmation of heteronomy. In opposition to this, I will propose an “involuntary insubordination,” a heteronomous autonomy or “freedom from behind,” as the form of freedom theorized by psychoanalysis and portrayed in Kafka’s fiction. Therein lies the warped or ironical optimism of both Freud and Kafka, whose lesson ought to be renewed today: however much the human being willingly accedes to its domination, there insists a certain measure of “unwanted freedom” that testifies to the impossibility of the individual’s smooth integration into society. Symptoms are political insofar as they are not simply disorders (sicknesses) but articulate tensions, gaps, and fault lines in the social order, and express a strange and idiosyncratic freedom.

This activity is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the project UID/00310/2025, Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa
(https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00310/2025)

Dirk-Michael Hennrich

Praxis-CFUL, University of Lisbon

On Animal Intelligence: Modes to Deconstruct the Technosphere

11 March 2025, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

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

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

In the current discussion about the concept of the Anthropocene, the implications of the Technosphere are becoming increasingly serious. The Technosphere refers to the totality of the technical objects and, depending on the interpretation, all activities to be prescribed in technical rationality, which superimposes on the Biosphere due to their exponential growth. In the future, this sphere, constructed by human activities and productions, will be intensively programmed and controlled by Artificial Intelligence. Thus appears a reality conjured already in dystopian science-fiction scenarios, in which the human or, in short, the animal spheres of action and decision-making are progressively restricted and marginalized. Without a determination of the question about the human being, or even the question of consciousness, having been satisfactorily answered, the development of the so-called Artificial Intelligence is being pushed forward and indorsed compared to all other forms of intelligence since an unspoken potential for the mastery of humanity immersed in the Technosphere is projected onto it. To read this tendency critically and to counteract the growing technization of the global sphere, a backward reflection and the rethinking of other forms of intelligence, especially Animal Intelligence, will be necessary. Animal intelligence includes Human Intelligence, and the first question is what exactly Animal Intelligence describes and what distinguishes it from Artificial Intelligence. To give a reason for this distinction, I introduce the concept of Ancestral Intelligence and define it as the potency that cannot be inserted into the artificial. This Ancestral Intelligence includes the ability to catch up with the immemorial/unprethinkable (das Unvordenkliche) and therefore the explanation leads consequently to a determination of what must (paradoxically) be thought of as immemorial. This immemorial is then the starting point for a Politics of the Sensible that is yet to come, and which locates the body and the most diverse bodily experiences of ancestrality in their centre.

Higher-Order Metaphysical Resolutions of the Continuum Hypothesis

Peter Fritz (University College London)

7 March 2025, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão [C201.J] (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: I aim to draw a connection between higher-order metaphysics and the philosophy of mathematics, in particular set theory. Higher-order metaphysics means carrying out metaphysical debates in higher-order logic, using higher-order quantifiers to regiment talk of propositions, properties, and relations. A prominent topic in this area is grain science, the investigation of individuation conditions of propositions, properties, and relations. These topics seem purely metaphysical. But I will argue that they are intimately connected to questions in (the philosophy of) mathematics. In particular, I will argue that views about grain science can resolve the continuum hypothesis. To do so, I will present an example of such a view. I won’t argue for it, but I hope to motivate, first, that the view is attractive, or at least not implausible; second, that the view doesn’t obviously prejudge controversial questions in (the philosophy of) set theory; and third, that the view nevertheless settles the continuum hypothesis. The view assumes that sets obey the principles of ZFC set theory, and that propositions form a structure which corresponds to a particular complete Boolean algebra. Adapting standard forcing results using Boolean-valued models, we can show that this higher-order metaphysical view entails the failure of the continuum hypothesis.

This work/event is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the project UID/00310/2025, Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa
(https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00310/2025)

Healthism, Neurodiversity, and Respectability Politics

Quill Kukla (Georgetown University)

28 February 2025, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão [C201.J] (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: “Healthism” is the pervasive ideology according to which each of us is responsible for valuing and protecting our own health and prioritizing health over other values, while society has the right to enforce, surveil, and reward healthy living. Neurodiversity and other forms of cognitive difference are generally understood through the lens of health: they are taken as diagnosable pathological conditions that should be treated or mitigated via medical interventions. Putting these two ideas together, neurodivergent people are supposed to try to be “healthy,” through pharmaceuticals, behavioral therapy, and the like, and society has an investment in making them be “healthy.” But neurodivergence is not a morbidity in a typical sense, so it is unclear what “health” means in this context. In practice, our societal standards for health for neurodivergent people are defined in terms of what avoids disrupting neurotypical expectations and systems or making neurotypical people uncomfortable. “Health,” for neurodivergent people, is in effect respectability—it is not defined in terms of their own needs or flourishing but in relation to the norms and needs of others. This can be seen from a close reading of diagnostic definitions and official medical “treatment” methods and goals. Trying to “treat” neurodivergent people by making them respectable citizens who are palatable within neurotypical productivity culture is usually likely to backfire; typically bad for their own well-being, and a social loss.

This work/event is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the project UID/00310/2025, Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa
(https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00310/2025)

Nuno Ribeiro

NOVA University of Lisbon

Pluralismo Filosófico e Drama Heteronímico em Fernando Pessoa

25 February 2025, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

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

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

A apresentação visa explorar as relações entre a constituição de um drama heteronímico e a criação de uma filosofia da pluralidade na obra de Fernando Pessoa, tendo por base a análise dos escritos filosóficos do espólio pessoano. Para esse efeito, dividirei a apresentação em duas partes: numa primeira, analisarei a relação entre o processo de dramatização e a constituição de um esboço de filosofia plural no período pré-heteronímico; numa segunda, explicitarei as relações entre o conceito de “drama em gente” e a construção de uma filosofia pluralista no período heteronímico.

How Do You Know That?

Giada Fratantonio (LanCog, University of Lisbon)

21 February 2025, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão [C201.J] (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: When someone asserts something, we sometimes respond by asking how they know, or what evidence they have, for their assertion. This is often a perfectly legitimate response, both in everyday life and in more formal settings. And yet, in some cases there is something uncomfortable about responding to the testimony of victims of trauma or discrimination with questions of this sort. One might think that this discomfort arises because asking these questions violates norms of privacy, politeness, or morality. This encourages the idea that we can and perhaps should ask these questions anyway in cases where our main concerns are epistemic. However, in this paper I argue that there are a broad range of cases where these questions are epistemically impermissible.

Ankica Čakardić

University of Zagreb

Family Abolition and Dead Labour: Hegel and Marxist-Feminism

18 February 2025, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

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

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

The Croatian philosopher and Marxist-humanist associated with the Yugoslav Praxis School, Blaženka Despot, wrote in one of her essays: “With Hegel’s philosophy, with his intervention on freedom, he becomes a necessary starting point for the foundation of a certain Marxist-feminism”. In this lecture, I will attempt to develop a Marxist-feminist reading of Hegel through the lens of social reproduction theory by tracing some of Despot’s Marxist-feminist ideas. Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) is all about life-making. Its core tenet is the fact that the accumulation of surplus value under capitalism is not possible without informal, dead and unpaid domestic labour that generates healthy labour power. SRT traces the “hidden” processes that enable production possible, looks closely “behind the scenes”, at family relations and marriage, and attempts to examine the phenomena of life-making and the produced gender reality. In Hegelian sense, it focuses on Ethical life in its totality, taking into account both the capitalist system of needs and the state as well as the backstage of these visible social relations, i.e. the nuclear family. In Hegel’s writings we are confronted not only simply and naturally with the problem of the family and patriarchy, but also with the presentation of the fact that they constitute the very basis of the reproduction of capitalist society. In order to solve this Hegelian problem in Marxist-feminist terms and to stake out the terrain for the actualised freedom and emancipation of women, we must tackle this goal in its totality, on the long term. In this context, the anti-capitalist solutions include not only the abolition of private property, but also the abolition of the monogamous nuclear family.

This activity is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the project UID/00310/2025, Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa
(https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00310/2025)

Julie Saada

Sciences Po Paris

Human Rights, Freedom, and Socioeconomic Rights

11 February 2025, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

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

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

I will analyze human rights from both historical and normative perspectives, focusing on three dialectical movements that characterize them. I will emphasize the interdependence of civil-political and socio-economic rights. The dialectic of the original productivity of human rights refers to the historical and intellectual movement that culminated in the French Revolution’s Rights of Man and of the Citizen. While individual rights were proclaimed as opposable to the sovereign, it was also through the absolutization of the sovereign’s authority that collective medieval legal forms were dissolved in favor of the individualization of rights. Subjective rights were thus constituted by a transformation of the legal subject, whose rights became opposable to power, and by a transformation of power, which granted rights to subjects. This movement led to what I term a ‘right to life beyond life,’ meaning a life transcending mere biological existence as it embodies the equal freedom of legal subjects. The right to life beyond life thus denotes the right to a particular political condition. However, this initial dialectic gives rise to two contradictions: Firstly, freedom is conceptualized as negative and individualistic, while the Declaration formulates economic and social rights that have been extensively developed in international Declarations and Conventions on human rights. Conceived as a right to a particular social condition, these rights focus on the material conditions necessary to realize freedom, emphasizing a collective dimension that presupposes social redistribution and solidarity mechanisms that states must ensure. This contradiction produces what I term a dialectic of the continuous production of human rights. Overcoming the contradiction between the two forms of freedom and the types of rights that constitute them can be achieved by establishing an interdependent relationship between rights. As expressed in civil and political rights, individual freedom can only be realized by promoting collective forms of freedom and rights. Thus, the right to life beyond life becomes not only a right to a particular political condition but also a right to a specific social condition, understood as a means of attaining freedom. Secondly, even when rights to a social condition are acknowledged, human rights remain abstract. Their general and indeterminate formulation is a prerequisite for their potential universalization. The contradiction lies in the fact that rights, which establish a right to life as a right to a specific political and social condition, are detached from what individuals and communities can actually do with them. They only become concrete rights when specified to particular agents in specific contexts, facilitated by specific implementation processes. Paradoxically, the universal formulation aims to render these rights locally interpretable and adaptable, creating a dialectic between the universal and the particular. The capabilities approach to human rights provides a means to verify that specific rights correspond to abstract rights and fulfill them, which is an essential condition of human dignity.

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This work/event is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the project UID/00310/2025, Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa
(https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00310/2025)