Reading Group in the scope of Praxis-CFUL activities

Working language: English

Organizers: Silvia Locatelli (locatelli.silvia.96 [at] gmail.com) & Maura Ceci (mauraceci [at] edu.ulisboa.pt)

When: Tuesdays, from 14h00 to 16h00, according to the calendar below

Where: Sala Pedro Hispano (Department of Philosophy)

To participate, please send an e-mail to the convenors expressing your interest in taking part in the RG.

Abstract

The philosophical questioning around the concept of history has always been a lively topic of discussion, traversing different currents of thought and animating debate since ancient Greek philosophy. In general, this philosophical discipline questions the meaning of history and its unfolding, raising issues and debates around the cyclical nature or linear progress  of history and the rationality or randomness of historical events.  In particular, this cycle of readings focuses on German philosophical thought around the concept of history. To this end, the program will adress Kant’s conception of universal history; Hegel’s conception of history as a spiritual movement;  Marx’s conception of history as a material process; the social-cultural implications on history elaborated by Weber; Benjamin’s radically antiteleological view of history.

Program

Session 1 | 18 October 2022

Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective” [link here]

Session 2 | 25 October 2022

Hegel, “Introduction to The Philosophy of History” (esp. “One. The Methods of History” and “Two. Reason in History”) [link here]

Session 3 | 22 November 2022

Marx, The Communist Manifesto [link here]

Session 4 | 29 November 2022

Weber, TBA

Session 5 | 13 December 2022

Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” [link here]

Susanna Lindberg

Leiden University

From Technological Humanity to Bio-technical Existence

4 October 2022, 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 conference, I will present the end results of a forthcoming book titled From technological humanity to bio-technical existence (SUNY 2023). The concrete motivation of this book is the rapid extension of the field of what I call anthropotechnics. This word designates in a general manner the technologies that are used, not simply on the nonhuman nature around us, but on the human being itself. We know how modern, technology, fulfilling the Cartesian project of becoming “masters and possessors of nature”, has ended in the mega-phenomenon called the anthropocene. Anthropotechnics returns this project on the human being itself and thinks of the human being as the master and possessor of its own nature. This is how all problems that have been generated by the Cartesian project concerning nonhuman nature not only find their echo in the case of the human being, but are also amplified, because the human being is not only the object of anthropotechnical elaboration but also its subject. As the object of anthropotechnics the human being can cultivate itself but also ends by exploiting and polluting itself; as the subject of anthropotechnics it is the responsible of all these effects, so that we might no need  an ecology of the “human nature” under the pressure of anthropotechnics. In this conference I do not answer to such conrete ethico-political questions, however, but I investigate the philosophical presuppositions of the phenomenon of anthropotechnics. How has the human being come to treat itself as an object of technical production? Since when it thinks of itself essentially as a technician? I condensate the philosophical presuppositions on the expression technological humanity, and I show how it has evolved notably in the works of Plessner, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Stiegler, Agamben and Hayles. They have discovered the importance of technics to the becoming of the human, but they have also shown how technics hollows out humanity – or how the concept of ‘technics’ allows showing the hollowness of the term ‘humanity.’ Technological humanity is therefore not an ideal figure that this philosophical discussion aims to erect, but is on the contrary an ambient and distorted image of the human that philosophy reveals in order to undo, dismantle, and deconstruct it. In this conference, I underline the deconstruction of the idea of technological humanity and present the notion of bio-technical existence that – as I claim – emerges as its condition. With the notion of “bio-technics” I want to show how not only how life is conceived of in technical terms today and how contemporary technics tends to imitate life. I also want to show on a fundamental ontological level how technics belongs to life, being its own way of reaching itself.

[This event had to be cancelled. It will be re-scheduled in the 2022/23 academic year]

Susanna Lindberg

Leiden University

From Technological humanity to bio-technical existence

7 June 2022, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy) | School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

Our time tends to depict itself as an epoch of technological humanity – not only because its environment is increasingly pervaded by technology, but above all because the human being itself is more and more affected by the technological situation. Some even claim that the technical transformations of the human are leading towards its overcoming, so that the obsolete form of humanity slowly gives way to something called posthumanity. But is this perception justified? Hasn’t the human world always been artificial and haven’t human beings always applied self-techniques on themselves? In my paper I refer to philosophers (Martin Heidegger, Helmuth Plessner, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler and Giorgio Agamben) who do not think that attention paid to technology will generate a new figure of the human, but that it will unfold human existence itself as originary technicity. This technicity is not another figure of the human, it is humanity as a capacity of figuration. The question is in the spirit of the times, however: How do technics affect human existence? Are contemporary technologies developing towards an overcoming of humanity, like some trans- and posthumanists claim? Instead of providing a simple answer to such a question, I aim to delve into the terms in which the questions are made. What is called “human” when “humanity” cannot be reduced to “mankind” anymore but is thought in continuity with a more general idea of life, instead? And what is called “technics”? We will see that the term “technics” has the most general possible sense covering tools, instruments, machines, technologies, techniques, disciplines, etc. What is called “technics” when it cannot be reduced to the skillful use of instruments or to the overwhelming machine culture that sweeps off everybody, but is intertwined with every aspect of life, so that contemporary existence turns finally out to be a bio-technical existence in the midst of an overwhelming techno-nature?

Roberto Nigro

Leuphana University Lüneburg

Genealogy and Critique of Neoliberal Subjectivity

31 May 2022, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy) | School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

If one of the tasks of philosophy consists in defining the time in which we live, how can we characterize our present? Perhaps the most appropriate answer to this question is the one situating it in the singular plural event that was 1968: a name and an event that entails a plurality of meanings. 1968 in a broad sense marked our contemporary time indelibly. At issue in some critical positions is sometimes an idea of 1968 as the dawn of neoliberal society. In other (diametrically opposed) accounts a sort of “left wing melancholia” emerges. Firstly, my talk will critically discuss these positions. Then, in a second step, it will examine two genealogical pathways, which may help to define the emergence of neoliberal subjectivity: the first one shows the link between neoliberal subjectivity and the practices of pastoral power elaborated in early Christianity and is indebted to Michel Foucault. The second one examines the development of neoliberalism by dint of conflictual dynamics that took place in the post-68 in the form of a capitalistic reaction to the movements, which struggled against the disciplinary society and the patriarchal capitalism.

Frank Ruda

University of Dundee

On the Concept of Prehistory, if it is one

24 May 2022, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy) | School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

Capitalism seems to have changed everything. It established a fundamentally new form of organising social relations and from its conception nothing – and perhaps not even nothing – remained the same. These are assumptions that have been often attributed to Marx (and Marxists), even by Marxists. Yet Marx explicitly identified capitalist political economy as a prehistoric formation. This puts pressure on the concept of prehistory, if it is one. This talk will attempt to deal with this pressure by returning to Marx.

Moirika Reker

Praxis-CFUL, University of Lisbon

Em torno da Filosofia do Jardim em Rosario Assunto, ou o jardim, sempre!

17 May 2022, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy) | School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

Ao longo de cerca de meio século, Rosario Assunto (1915-1994) tomou em mãos a tarefa de pensar a beleza e a centralidade da estética, não só para a filosofia, mas para a vida humana em toda a sua amplitude. O seu pensamento, frequentemente em confronto com as posições dominantes, debruçou-se sobre vários temas e períodos, tendo sempre como fim compreender as múltiplas formas como se dá a relação do homem consigo mesmo e com o mundo – donde a sua crítica acutilante a determinados traços da modernidade, em clara ruptura com o primado da beleza. A filosofia do jardim de Assunto é, simultaneamente, o ápice dessa “batalha de ideias” e o trabalho que lhe mereceu maior reconhecimento, resgatando-o do seu isolamento e atestando a sua actualidade. Na sua reflexão o jardim assume-se como o fiel da balança da relação entre o homem e a sua base natural, abrindo portas a perspectivar o jardim como lugar de ensaio para a recuperação de uma relação homem-natureza regida pela sensatez e harmonia. Para tal, partiremos de duas questões preliminares: 1) o que significa filosofar sobre o jardim; 2) porquê tomar o jardim como objecto de estudo.

Christian Lotz

Michigan State University

Categories in Phenomenology and Critical Theory. On Heidegger and Lukács

10 May 2022, 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 rejection of a foundational political economy in contemporary “official” critical theory leads to an empiricist and skeptical framework in which, ultimately, the social reality or the society is an arbitrarily established sum of acts and events, which, as such, do not form an actuality [Wirklichkeit]. There can be acts and events in such a social theory, but in the strict sense it would not even be a theory of society because there is no object of such a theory. To grasp society as an object means that it presupposes a unity as objectivity in its categorial form. Kant — and Marx ! — argue that the conditions of the experience of objects are at the same time the conditions of the objects of that experience. An objective theory of society (i.e., one that is not simply the subject’s construction) is a theory in which the categorial organization of social reality is to be found in the social reality, without being metaphysically or logically deducted. Instead, the categorial organization must be phenomenologically revealed. The concept of category is not only important for Lukács, but also, as a short look into the (German) intellectual network in European philosophy at the beginning of the 20th Century shows, for all prominent schools, insofar as the question of how to understand the concept of category is central for their attempts to escape metaphysics. For example, phenomenologists ranging from Husserl to Heidegger were concerned with a reinterpretation of the concept of categories, insofar as these thinkers try to rescue it from what they conceive as its subjective background in Kant. On the one hand, we find attempts to re-interpret categories as something that transcend the positioning of the transcendental subject as something that is somehow given in life (Lask), but on the other hand, we find attempts to turn categories into units of meaning [Sinn] and “regional” frames (Husserl); and, finally, we also find the attempt to re-interpret categories through a hermeneutic lens, such as in Dilthey’s categories of life synthesis  [Lebenszusammenhang] and in Heidegger, who transforms “categories” into what he famously calls “existentialia” in Being and Time. On a side note, we find the problem of categories also addressed as a crucial problem in other philosophers and sociologists, such as Bloch, Durkheim, Maus, Piaget, and Hartmann. In my talk, I will offer reflections on the concept of category in Lukács and Heidegger in order to move at least closer to what I conceive of as the most crucial methodological problem in critical theory; namely, how to generate the basic concepts of a theory of society that must, in order to be established successfully as the true theory of society, claim that it is objective. Accordingly, I submit that the concept of category is a crucial steppingstone towards a theory of social concept-formation.

Titus Stahl

University of Groningen

Ideals without Idealization: Why Critical Theories Need a Reference to an Ideal Society

3 May 2022, 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 contemporary liberal political theory, “ideal theorists” argue that we can only fix the meaning of our most important political concepts by reference to an imagined ideal state of affairs, and that we therefore, to some extent, have to engage in Utopian thinking. Traditionally, critical theories from Marx to the Frankfurt School as well as some contemporary critical theorists like Charles Mills, are highly skeptical towards this affirmative use of idealization, using arguments that often seem similar to those of current political realists. In my paper, I make three arguments: First, I show that the critical theory tradition offers a range of anti-Utopian arguments that draw on the historical situatedness of our political reason which do not coincide with those of political realism. Second, I argue that most of the arguments of critical theorists fail to make a principled case only against context-free idealization, but not against ideal theorizing as such. Third, I argue that the method of immanent critique that is specific to critical theory, allows for a conception of an ideal state of affairs that emerges from its diagnosis of social contradictions. On the basis of these three arguments I argue that critical theories can (and should) incorporate some aspects of ideal theorizing and its Utopian reference to a better society.

Sofia Miguens

University of Porto

Os abismos que existem entre nós – Cora Diamond e o relativismo em ética

19 April 2022, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy) | School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

A partir do livro de Cora Diamond, Reading Wittgenstein With Anscombe. Going On to Ethics (2019), procurarei explicitar as razões por que uma posição wittgensteiniana em ética não é necessariamente relativista. Darei especial atenção ao exemplo de Diamond, o pensamento ’Slavery is unjust and insupportable’. Na obra de Diamond a caso da escravatura é o sucessor do caso da vida animal (The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy, 2008). Em ambos os casos há pessoas que pensam, ou pensaram, como natural aquilo que para outras é simplesmente impensável: ter como escravos outros humanos, ou alimentarmo-nos de outros animais. Em ambos os casos existe, segundo Diamond, uma distância entre o que é pensado por uns e o que é pensado por outros que está para além do desacordo argumentativo. Diamond apresenta uma proposta de análise de tais abismos entre nós (gulfs between us) que faz um trabalho importante em ética.

Dominik Finkelde SJ

Hochschule für Philosophie München

Reason and Anamorphosis. On Subjectivity as a Feature of Reality in Hegel and Lacan

5 April 2022, 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 any account of how things really are, subjectivity can be both a formal and a distorting factor for Hegel and Lacan’s adaptation of Hegelian dialectics. Lacan speaks of a pre-theoretical experience of being in the world where human beings are literally called by reality to be social agents and fill in gaps of this reality at the same time with their fantasies. As such, fantasies play an epistemic role, neglected often in both epistemological and ontological debates. But since the status of reality, with or without fantasies, is never all and complete, antagonisms within reality cannot be contained. Ontology, as our inquiry into ‘what there is,’ affects ‘what there is’ in that subjectivity, troubled by antagonism, always goes beyond established forms of facts, theoretically, practically and phantasmagorically. In my presentation, I argue that, especially with reference to Kant, Hegel and Lacan, that subjectivity, with its imaginary intertwinement of what Lacan calls the symbolic order, is a feature of reality (as virtuality) and not just a hallmark of the conscious mind.