Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (Verso, 2023) offers a compelling entry point for examining the exercise of power in our contemporary post-industrial world, moving beyond traditional frameworks of violence and ideology. Bringing together philosophical, economic, historical, and sociological perspectives, the book enriches both the reading experience and the discussions that follow.

This activity is open to researchers and students—whether affiliated with Praxis-CFUL or not—who are interested in a deep analysis of political economy. Sessions will take place on Thursdays (except for Friday, May 2nd) from 12h30 to 14h00 in Room Pedro Hispano (Department of Philosophy).

Working language: English

Co-organizers: Mariana Teixeira (mariana.o.teixeira [at] edu.ulisboa.pt) and Juana Polo López (juana.lopez [at] edu.ulisboa.pt)

More info here!

Program

Session 1 | 27 March

Introduction (pp. 1–19)

Session 2 | 3 April

Part I: 1. Conceptualising Power and Capital + 2. Power and Marxism (pp. 23–69)

Session 3 | 10 April

3. The Social Ontology of Economic Power + 4. The Human Corporeal Organisation (pp. 70–103)

Session 4 | 24 April

5. Metabolic Domination + Part II: 6. Transcendental Class Domination (pp. 104–151)

Session 5 | 2 May

7. Capital and Difference + 8. The Universal Power of Value (pp. 152–199)

Session 6 | 8 May

9. Value, Class, and Competition (pp. 200–221)

Session 7 | 22 May

Part III: 10. The Despotism of Subsumption (pp. 225–252)

Session 8 | 29 May

11. The Capitalist Reconfiguration of Nature + 12. Logistical Power (pp. 253–295)

Session 9 | 5 June

13. Surplus Populations and Crisis + Conclusion (pp. 296-326)

Rodrigo Castro Orellana

Complutense University of Madrid

Neoliberalismo y temporalidad

25 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

Los dispositivos neoliberales modelan la vida como una tarea infinita y acelerada para lograr un futuro que nunca llega o que siempre está en riesgo de desaparecer como consecuencia de las decisiones personales que se tomen. Así se configura un mundo sin exterioridad en donde el porvenir se retrasa sistemáticamente expandiendo el presente hasta convertirlo en una realidad absoluta. La construcción neoliberal del tiempo opera, entonces, como ausencia de novedad y disolución de la percepción del futuro, haciendo que la experiencia de la aceleración coexista con la experiencia de la repetición y de un presente cada vez más lento. Sin embargo, estos procesos resultan inseparables de dinámicas de construcción del espacio, de mecanismos de captura de la subjetividad que operan como atmosferas generadoras de incertidumbre. Nuestro objetivo en esta conferencia será reflexionar sobre estos procesos que caracterizan la temporalidad propia de las sociedades neoliberales.

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)

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.