Christine Habbard

University of Lille

The Power of Representation, or The Representation of Power

16 April 2024, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

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

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

The term “Representation” is ambiguous: it refers both to an image (the iconic meaning) and to the act of speaking or acting on behalf of someone (the political or legal meaning). These two meanings are usually not envisaged together, especially in political philosophy. My lecture will on the contrary focus on how, in early Modernity, the two meanings were intertwined, and the birth of the Nation-State (the epitome of political representation), was made possible by its graphic construction on the map. The visual representation of the State on the map enabled its conceptualisation as a unified, sovereign power over a bounded territory, which in turn allowed it to act in the stead of, or on behalf of its people. The State had to be seen, visualised and represented (in maps, but also through paintings, sculptures…) in order to be a legitimate representative of its emerging nation. In other words, representation is what gave power to this representative power. This will in turn allow me to look at how cartography (and State cartography in particular) enabled the enduring switch from one meaning of representation (the likeness of an image) to the other (semiotic – the sign, the proxy).

Sami Khatib

Oriental Institute Beirut

It speaks: Marx and commodity language

2 April 2024, 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 Capital, vol. 1, Marx wrote: “If commodities could, speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it.” If Marx’s compelling prosopopoeia is not merely a rhetorical figure, external to what is signified by it, we are to ask what is the nature of this language in contradistinction to ‘natural’ languages like German, French, or English, or certain jargons employed by economics. Commodity language expresses the differential relation of value, a “purely social” relation. It functions as a quasi-transcendental structure that conditions economic-linguistic speech acts before and ahead of culturally situated semantic content and ‘communicated’ use-values. If every commodity actually speaks [spricht] and mis-speaks/promises [verspricht] another commodity, what is the secret of this language, which lends them their ‘universal’, that is, seemingly trans-national, trans-cultural and trans-historical communicability and commensurability? Relying on K. Karatani, W. Hamacher, F. de Saussure and W. Benjamin, my talk explores the aesthetic and political consequences of commodity language and its repressed negativity (non-identity, inversion, mismatch, asymmetry, closure, un-disclosedness et al.).

There Is No Such Thing as Conventionalism about Personal Identity

Eric Olson (University of Sheffield)

5 April 2024, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

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

Abstract: It’s often said that personal identity is ‘conventional’ in that it depends on our attitudes and practices: it’s not a fact to be discovered, but a matter for decision. There are a number of different claims about ‘personal identity’ that are said to be conventional in this way. Some are intelligible but not actually conventionalism as advertised. Some are indeed conventionalist but unintelligible. Some are intelligible and conventionalist but not very interesting. But there appears to be no genuine conventionalism about personal identity that is both intelligible and interesting.

What Context-Relative Belief Could Be Like

Roger Clarke (Queen’s University Belfast)

22 March 2024, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

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

Abstract: Several philosophers have recently defended metaphysically context-relative views of belief. But for many of us, it’s not clear what context-relativity could be if it isn’t semantic (or more broadly, linguistic) context-relativity. In this paper, I explore the idea of context-relative metaphysics through several examples, mostly taken from high-school science.

Marie Goupy

Catholic University of Paris

The government of permanent emergency and its specters

19 March 2024, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

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

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

The reflection I’d like to propose is based on works on emergency powers and emergency law, which have become increasingly more common in liberal states, giving rise to the polemic term “permanent state of exception”. This notion, first introduced by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, has given rise to a great deal of debates. Jurists have almost observed that, while the term is supposed to describe a situation of suspension of law, or a legal vacuum, the exact opposite is true: in liberal states, the management of emergency situations has given rise to a kind of normative proliferation, an acceleration in the production of legal norms, which tends to embrace the emergency. An emergency that itself tends to have no end in sight. In this presentation, I would like to use those works on the law of emergency as the basis for a reflection on a dominant conception of time, which is perfectly legible in some important theories of exception. To do this, I will draw specifically on the work of two American jurists, almost unknown in France, but famous in the United States, E. Posner and A. Vermeule. I will show that their conception of emergency law, which is very developed, if not dominant in administrations in liberal states, can be described as a technicist and continuous management of emergency – and in this sense, it reflects a presentist conception of time (in François Hartog’s sense). But on the other hand, the authors fail to rid themselves of the very concept of “crisis”, as a dangerous and radical break with the existing order, and above all as a specter – the specter of a shift towards an illiberal regime, or perhaps even more radically, the specter of general crisis.

The Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon (CFUL) welcomes expressions of interest from candidates wishing to conduct research leading to the award of a Doctorate in Philosophy (with particular emphasis on the History of Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy or Practical Philosophy), with  CFUL as the host institution. Interested candidates will be subject to an initial screening, after which supported candidates must apply directly to the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia to obtain funding [FCT announcement]. We will provide assistance with the application process.

Interested parties should express their interest by March 27, 2024, by sending the following information, in English or Portuguese:

e-mail: c.filosofia@letras.ulisboa.pt

Subject: BID 2024 FCT_ [the applicant’s name]

Send:

1) Research Plan (one page)

2) Curriculum Vitae in PDF

3) Name of the supervisor with whom you would like to work or research group where you would like to develop your research.

The decision on which applications the CFUL will support will be communicated within aprox. one week.

The FCT call will be open from March 18 to April 18, 2024, at 17:00 (Lisbon time) and must contain the following elements:

1) Detailed research plan

2) Curriculum Vitae (on the CIÊNCIAVITAE platform)

3) Motivation letter

4) Two recommendation letters

5) In case of academic degrees awarded by foreign higher education institutions, recognition of those degrees and conversion of the respective final classification into the Portuguese classification scale.(*)

(*) The recognition of foreign academic degrees and diplomas as well as the conversion of the final classification into the Portuguese classification scale may be requested in any public higher education institution, or in the Directorate-General for Higher Education (DGES). Regarding this matter, we suggest that you consult the DGES portal at the following address:https://www.dges.gov.pt/en/pagina/degree-and-diploma-recognition

Disputed Disputes

Pedro Abreu & Marcin Lewiński (IFILNOVA, New University of Lisbon)

15 March 2024, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

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

Abstract: Our goal is to isolate and analyse a category of “disputed disputes”: philosophically relevant disputes which do not admit of an easy dismissal as verbal nor of straightforward recognition as factual. We offer a new set of arguments challenging the attempts of adjudicating between these two possibilities. We pay special attention to how these attempts are articulated in the recent debates over metalinguistic negotiations — worthwhile disputes about which meaning to associate with some particular expression (Plunkett & Sundell, 2013, 2023). While Plunkett and Sundell hold metalinguistic negotiations to be “ubiquitous”, some recent criticisms maintain that many such disputes should be taken at face value as standard disagreements (Ball, 2020; Schroeter et al., 2022; Koslicki & Massin, 2023). Both positions are built on the underlying assumption that there is indeed a principled and operationalizable distinction to be made between two fundamentally different kinds of disputes. We challenge this assumption. Careful attention to the conditions of the debate reveals: i) unexpected congruence between the interpretative strategies and resources deployed by the two sides in the debate, ii) circularity and indeterminacy brought about by the possibility of applying the metalinguistic negotiation interpretation to the very disputes over the nature of disputed disputes, and, iii) the proliferation of available notions of meaning and corresponding forms of disagreement and verbalness. We show how these considerations coalesce to undermine the possibility of a principled choice between the two interpretations — metalinguistic negotiation and first-order disagreement — and to cast doubts on the claim that there is really a significant choice to be made between them.

Mariana Teixeira

Praxis-CFUL

Ambiguidade e Dilaceração: Simone de Beauvoir Entre o Eco- e o Xeno-Feminismo

12 March 2024, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

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

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

A distinção entre género como construção social e sexo como dado biológico tem implicações emancipatórias bem conhecidas: se as mulheres não são naturalmente inclinadas a determinados papéis, espaços e actividades sociais, ou seja, se estes condicionamentos são historicamente impostos, também podem ser historicamente transformados. Por mais libertadores que tenham sido os seus efeitos, esta ideia foi mais tarde contestada por uma suposta depreciação masculinista da natureza em favor da agência humana. No âmbito do feminismo, estas posições opostas são representadas pelas vertentes xeno- e ecofeminista: enquanto a primeira vê a emancipação como transcendência, como domínio da natureza, a segunda equipara-a antes à imanência, a uma ligação harmoniosa com a natureza. Em ambos os casos, no entanto, a divisão sexo/género tende a ser preservada na sua dicotomia aparentemente intransponível. Para evitar a adoção unilateral de um dos pólos – natureza ou cultura, imanência ou transcendência -, sugiro que um tratamento mais convincente da relação entre sexo e género (natureza e cultura, corpo e mente) pode ser obtido a partir dos escritos de Simone de Beauvoir. Embora critique decididamente o confinamento multissecular das mulheres à imanência, Beauvoir não equipara a emancipação ao mero aumento do controlo das mulheres sobre os seus corpos e o mundo natural, , uma vez que a imanência não é vista apenas como um limite à transcendência, mas também como a sua própria condição de possibilidade. A conceção intersubjectiva de Beauvoir da individualidade e a sua recusa de uma dualidade ontológica entre natureza e espírito permitem, assim, uma conceção da condição humana como simultaneamente sujeito e objeto. Para compreender as diferentes formas de experienciar esta tensão, proponho ainda uma distinção entre ambiguidade existencial e dilaceração contingente. Deste modo, numa perspetiva beauvoiriana, a emancipação seria concebida não como a eliminação da ambiguidade entre imanência e transcendência; em vez disso, envolveria a superação, por meio do movimento recíproco das subjectividades encarnadas, de uma dilaceração não mediada.

Why do Computational Templates Work Across Scientific Disciplines?

Mariana Seabra (LanCog, Centre of Philosophy, University of Lisbon)

8 March 2024, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

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

Abstract: Computational methods and their subsidiary models (including both physics-driven methods that appeal to differential equations, and data-driven computational methods that allow the extraction of meaningful patterns from data sets, often without explicit appeal to laws of nature or theories) are used to perform diagnosis, characterization and prediction in systems of interest. Furthermore, these computational methods are applied successfully across scientific disciplines, that is, the same computational structures, termed computational templates, are employed to solve problems in a wide range of scientific domains, from physics to biology, neurology, economics, and so forth. In this talk I try to explain the success of computational templates across different science fields, constructing a scientifically informed version of the ‘fudging solution’ for the applicability of mathematics as it arises for computational templates. I argue that the various templates available, from differential calculus to statistical models, capture change or changing tendencies in a system of interest. Corrections performed within the various stages of model construction not only concern updates in the formal structure of computational templates, but also progressively update the ontology of interest. What is perceived as the applicability of templates to physical reality is already the result of many such corrections, in which models are tailored to the system at hand.

Jamila Mascat

Utrecht University

If I Can’t Speak For You, It’s Not My Revolution! Feminist Politics Between the Personal and the Political

5 March 2024, 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 genealogy of feminist and postcolonial critique, the act of “speaking for” another – that is, representing their voice on their behalf – has long been condemned as a violation, undermining the legitimacy and agency of marginalized subjects. However, as Adrienne Rich perfectly phrases it in her “Notes towards a Politics of Location” (1984), if “You cannot speak for me,” “I cannot speak for us,” and the use of pronouns becomes a “political problem,” feminist praxis risks being reduced to a collection of “ego-histories” and “singular pasts” (Traverso, 2022). Drawing from the predicament of pronouns as it emerged in contemporary feminist politics, the paper critically engages with the role of personal experience, first-person accounts, and individual feelings in feminist narratives. In conclusion, it advocates for revisiting the Hegelian form of the concrete universal to rethink radical feminist partisanship.