Tamara Caraus

Centre of Philosophy – University of Lisbon

Abstract

A common critique of cosmopolitanism is that human motivational drives such as empathy or a sense of fairness cannot be extended to anonymous strangers or to large and distant groups, thus the cosmopolitan motivation can never arise or cannot arise without moral costs, while some accounts of cosmopolitanism speak of a necessity of ‘metamorphosis’, ‘self-transformation’, ‘conversion’, ‘restructuring of the world view’, etc., as a precondition of becoming cosmopolitan. The hypothesis of this presentation is that the difficulties of being cosmopolitan mirror the difficulties of the command ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, and the aim of the presentation is to dismantle the difficulties and demandingness of the command to love your neighbour in order to understand the core of cosmopolitan demandingness. The difficulties of loving the neighbour will be examined by analysing Freud’s account on the un-lovable neighbour in Civilisation and Its Discontents, and Lacan’s stance, from his Ethics of Psychoanalysis, toward Freud’s reluctance to go beyond the alleged impossibility of loving the neighbour. While Freud’s aversion to the neighbour comes from his belonging to the Aristotelian horizon of ethics, happiness and conception of the good, for Lacan the command to love the neighbour is an excess to this horizon, and the concept of the neighbour is linked to a singular structure extimacy which points to a coincidence of something most intimate, intrinsic to us, with something most external and utterly foreign. Thus, the love of the neighbour is always an excess, stretching beyond reciprocity and acknowledging the uncanny strangeness of extimacy. From this perspective, the cosmopolitan metamorphosis/conversion/self-transformation presupposes the love of the neighbour as an experience of the excess and as an event of acknowledging extimacy. Thus, as an excessive event, cosmopolitanism is not a platitudinous love of humanity, it remains a difficult stance. The love of the neighbour can be regarded as the ‘truth’ of cosmopolitanism, however this very demandingness makes room for a radical cosmopolitics.

Gavin Rae

Complutense University of Madrid

Strategies of Political Resistance: Agamben and Irigaray

4 February 2020, 18:00 h

Room B6 – Library Building

Faculty of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

This talk focuses on the thought of Giorgio Agamben and Luce Irigaray to engage with the question of political resistance. Little work has been done to bring these two thinkers together, but my guiding contention is that there are important overlaps between them, especially on this issue. To develop this, I first outline Agamben’s analysis of homo sacer and related claim that Western juridical-political systems are structured around a binary exclusion/inclusion opposition that is used to regulate life (zoe) itself. Although there is significant contention in the literature regarding whether Agamben offers the possibility of moving beyond this logic, I argue that he does and focus on his analysis of the Aristotelian conception of ‘potentiality,’ from which he derives the notions of ‘impotentiality,’ ‘inoperativity,’ and ‘destituent-power’ to develop a political strategy that argues for the initial deactivation of the biopolitical machine to permit a space to subsequent re-conceive what he calls the coming politics. On first glance, Irigaray’s critique of the West’s phallogocentrism appears to have little to do with Agamben’s biopolitical project, but I will argue that it actually shares a number of its logical presuppositions, insofar as she claims that Western thinking on sexual difference has been structured around a binary opposition wherein ‘woman’ is devalued and excluded from (masculine-defined) law, with this permitting the phallogocentric regime to better regulate her life. I subsequently show that, in her early work, Irigaray points to the political importance of mimicry and laughter to ‘jam the theoretical machine’ sustaining phallogocentrism to subsequently permit a rethinking of sexual difference in non-phallogocentric terms. I conclude that with this Agamben and Irigaray share a common political project that aims to move us from a politics of conflict and contestation to one based around a logic of disarmament and deactivation, before raising some critical questions regarding this endeavour.

Simone Gozzano

University of L’Aquila

Phenomenal Roles

20 December 2019, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: I argue that phenomenal properties are dispositional in nature. To this end, I argue that these properties are individuated by their phenomenal roles, which I distinguish in internal – individuating pain per se – and external – determining further non painful phenomenal states. Then I argue that such individuation overcomes difficulties raised by Lowe, because these phenomenal roles can be organized in a necessarily asymmetrical net, thus favoring their individuation. Thus organized, the individuation conditions of phenomenal roles fare better with respect to the solutions proposed by Bird and Yates, because they allow for multiple realizability. I also provide reasons to argue that these roles satisfy modal fixity, as posited by Bird, and can be considered as substantial properties entrenched in laws of nature.

Johanna Wolff

King’s College London

Adventures in the Metaphysics of Quantities:

A Third Way Between Comparativism and Absolutism?

13 December 2019, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: One of the key issues in the metaphysics of quantities is the dispute between comparativists and absolutists. What is the debate about and who has the upper hand? I argue that neither absolutism nor comparativism as they have been presented in the debate are attractive positions in the metaphysics of quantities and offer a form of sophisticated substantivalism as an alternative.

Sam Baron

University of Western Australia

Grounding vs. Causation

6 December 2019, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: What is the difference between grounding and causation? A number of philosophers have advocated the temporal criterion: causation occurs across time, grounding does not. The temporal criterion has been challenged on two fronts. First, directly, by offering examples of grounding that occur across time and, second, indirectly, through the development of metaphysical models that make use of transtemporal grounding. In light of these challenges, a new temporal criterion is proposed. The difference between grounding and causation involves the use that they make of time: causation requires time to connect spatially distant relata, grounding does not. This difference speaks to an important aspect of the job description of grounding: namely, that it can construct the world over space. (This work is based on ‘Grounding at a Distance’, with Kristie Miller and Jonathan Tallant.)

Sam Baron

University of Western Australia

Unification and Mathematical Explanation

4 December 2019, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Room B? (close to the Faculty’s Library)

Abstract: Mathematics clearly plays an important role in scientific explanation. Debate continues, however, over the kind of role that mathematics plays. Mathematics may be playing a ‘thick’ explanatory role, in this sense: there are some physical phenomena that occur for mathematical reasons. Alternatively, it may be that mathematics is playing a ‘thin’ explanatory role by merely representing the physical reasons why certain phenomena occur. It has been argued that the explanatory indispensability of mathematics under-determines the kind of role that mathematics plays, and so doesn’t provide a reason to believe that mathematics is playing a thick role. I argue that if mathematical and physical explanations are indispensably unified within science, then we have good reason to believe that mathematics is playing a thick role. The argument provides guidance on the types of explanation we should be looking for to establish that mathematics is genuinely explanatory.

Peter Sullivan

University of Stirling

Anscombe’s ‘Retractation’:

A Reconsideration of Ramsey and the Tractatus

29 November 2019, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: In 1965 Elizabeth Anscombe published a short paper in Analysis, ‘Retractation’, in which she reviewed and revised important aspects of the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus advanced in her pioneering and insightful study of the work, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959). These aspects of her interpretation were developed in the book largely through criticism of the ideas of Frank Ramsey, most fully expressed in his 1925 paper ‘Universals’. They involved, she came subsequently to think, a wrong estimation of the force of Ramsey’s arguments, and consequent misreading of related themes in the Tractatus. Summing up her reconsideration of these issues she said in the 1965 paper, “I now think Ramsey was righter than I ever realized”. In my talk I will argue that she was right about this, but that even in her revised view Anscombe still under-estimates Ramsey, that Ramsey was “righter” than she even then realized – and that understanding just why this is so sheds a broad light on Wittgenstein’s intentions in the Tractatus.

Free Attendance

For further information, please contact CFUL at c.filosofia@letras.ulisboa.pt

José Manuel Mestre

LANCOG & University of Stirling

Whence the Paralysis?

22 November 2019, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: In the spring of 1913, Wittgenstein presented Russell with an objection to his multiple relation theory of judgement that supposedly ‘paralysed’ him. The fact that there is no detailed record of the objection has led to a great deal of speculation concerning its precise meaning. Commentators have typically assumed the objection to be valid, given its impact on Russell. Yet interpretations divide in a way that suggests a sort of dilemma: roughly, internal objections are weak, strong objections are external. One might therefore want to disentangle the question of what exactly Wittgenstein’s point was, both from what Russell took it to be, and from what the intrinsic demerits of Russell’s theory are. Here I’ll review some of these interpretations, and then raise a different objection that rather relates to Ramsey’s own insightful discussion of the multiple relation theory.

Elia Zardini

Complutense University of Madrid

Open Knowledge of One’s Inexact Knowledge

15 November 2019, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: The paper presents an overarching argument to the effect that, given a certain attractive picture according to which—in certain situations, for certain obviously true propositions—(being in a position to have) knowledge iterates, single-premise closure of knowledge under logical consequence fails. The situations in question involve inexact knowledge, originating with one’s less than perfect powers of discrimination. Along the way to the main conclusion, it is first argued that the justification of margin-for-error principles as principles governing inexact knowledge is based on two flawed assumptions and that the principles themselves fail to provide a necessary condition for inexact knowledge. That crucially disposes of an influential argument against the KK-principle, whose validity—at least with respect to the highly controlled situation of inexact knowledge that will be taken as example—is then positively supported with two arguments concerning respectively the elevation of evidence for epistemically higher-order propositions and the norms of assertion and belief. A new and more powerful argument from inexact knowledge is then proposed against the KK-principle. However, it is observed that the argument crucially relies on certain closure principles that, under the extremely plausible assumption that knowledge iterates for certain obviously true propositions, can be shown to be unacceptable since they in effect license soritical principles. Finally, the model theory and proof theory of a non-regular modal logic for the knowledge modality are developed, and a consistency proof is given of the conjunction of the KK principle (a fortiori, of the assumption that knowledge iterates for certain obviously true propositions) with certain principles reflecting the inexactness of much of our knowledge.

Mark Jago

University of Nottingham

Metaphysical Structure

15 November 2019, 10:30

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Metaphysical structure is the way things hang together, in and of themselves, and aside from their causes and effects and propensities to behave. Examples include: truth depending on reality, the mind depending on the brain, sets depending on their members, disjunctions depending on their disjuncts, wholes depending on their parts, types being realised by their tokens, determinables being determined by their determinates. These might all be understood as cases of grounding – or rather, they might if we understood what grounding is. In this talk, I investigate parallels between metaphysical construction and familiar logical operators. First, there’s a link between composition (of parts into a whole) and conjunction. Second, I argue, there’s a link between some familiar metaphysical relations and disjunction. On the picture that emerges, metaphysical structure may be understood as logical structure, whilst remaining a genuine mind, concept, and language-independent feature of reality.