Gianfranco Casuso

Pontifical Catholic University of Peru

Socio-Epistemic Pathologies. The Double Dimension of Social Criticism and the Problem of Asymptomaticity

10 November 2020, 18h00 (Lisbon Time - GMT+0)

This session will take place via streaming (Zoom link here)

Abstract

It is common to affirm – and that is what Honneth believes that Critical Theory has done since its origins – that the indicator that can give us the clue that a social situation hides pathological features is suffering – not just that of members of social groups easily identifiable as vulnerable or disadvantaged, but potentially all people to varying degrees. Be that as it may, suffering should be a kind of “symptom” of social pathology. However, and here is where the difficulties begin, immediately appealing to the individual experience of suffering does not necessarily allow us to get out of the trap, because the problem lies in that the dual pathological condition of society is so powerful that under a veil of normality it even blocks the emergence of every possible symptom. In my talk, I will try to delve into this problematic link between suffering and social pathology as developed by Honneth, both from his own Hegelian reading of a deficit of rationality, and from Adorno’s idea of a sick normality. This will be done against the background of the less worked phenomenon of social asymptomaticity.

Grounding the Future (and the Future of Grounding)
Roberto Loss (University of Hamburg)

6 November 2020, 16:00 | The talk will be given in a mixed presence regime

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa
Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia) & live-streamed

Abstract: According to what may be labelled ‘serious Ockhamism’, (i) the future is open, (ii) the openness of the future consists in the fact that what exists is insufficient to determine the truth-value of (at least some) future-directed statements, and yet (iii) future-directed statements all possess a determinate truth-value. Serious Ockhamism appears to be in tension with the idea that truth is grounded in reality. Some serious Ockhamists bite the bullet and accept some truths to be indeed ungrounded. Others prefer, instead, a more sophisticated approach and claim that even if future-contingent statements are not grounded in the way reality is, they are nevertheless not ungrounded, as they are ‘cross-temporally’ grounded in the way reality will be. In this talk I will construe the grounding challenge faced by serious Ockhamists as involving the notion of metaphysical grounding and I will argue that, although the kind of ‘cross-temporal grounding’ serious Ockhamists appeal to is in tension with a set of rather ‘orthodox’ grounding principles, serious Ockhamists appear to have independent reasons to embrace at least a certain kind of grounding ‘heresy’.

Free Attendance, but preregistration required: https://www.lancog.com/lancog/registration/

Oliver Marchart

University of Vienna

Always Ontologize! The Political Thinking of Antagonism

3 November 2020, 18h00 (Lisbon Time - GMT+0)

This session will take place via streaming (Zoom link here)

Abstract

Presuppositions about the nature of social being are implied by any kind of social research – sometimes openly, but most often silently. Any political interpretation, as William Connolly once argued, invokes a set of ontological assumptions about the very nature of the social bond. Social analysis, therefore, warrants interpretations, not only of particular social phenomena, but of the nature of social being in general: of being-qua-being. Every inquiry into the social world can thus be referred back, in the last instance, to a very simple question: ‘what’s going on with Being?’ (Gianni Vattimo). The wager of my presentation will be that something political is going on with Being. More than that: Being is political, and the name of the political is antagonism. It is the ineradicably antagonistic nature of social being that accounts for the disturbances and asymmetries of the social: the conflicts, the power discrepancies, the relations of subordination and oppression. A case will be made that thinking, as a collective and conflictual practice, needs to take account of antagonism at the ground of being.

Against the Pretense View of Fiction
Manuel García-Carpintero (University of Barcelona / LOGOS / LanCog)

30 October 2020, 16:00 | Online, via Zoom

Abstract: In his classic paper “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse” (1974/5), John Searle argued that fictions don’t result from dedicated, sui generis acts (or, in to me equivalent terms, are not dedicated, sui generis artefacts) in the way assertions, questions or directives are; they are just pretenses of acts like those – the view had been defended earlier by Margaret MacDonald (1954) and Richard Gale (1971). Searle’s arguments were seriously challenged by Currie and Walton, proponents of different versions of the dedicated artefact view in their respective very influential 1990 books. In recent work, Peter Alward and Stefano Predelli have argued for a more sophisticated version of a Searlian view. In this paper I’ll confront their arguments, in defense of (my own version of) the dedicated artefact view. I’ll elaborate in my own terms on two decisive objections, not adequately acknowledged by either Currie or Walton: first, that the Searlian view is implausibly committed to there being fictional narrators in all fictions; second, that the view has implausible commitments on how referential expressions work in fictional discourse, implying that (as van Inwagen and Kripke put it in work in the 1970s) fictional utterances including them “don’t express propositions”.

Free Attendance, but preregistration required: https://www.lancog.com/lancog/registration/

Tamara Caraus

Praxis-CFUL / University of Lisbon

Marx’s Radical Cosmopolitics

27 October 2020, 18h00 (Lisbon Time - GMT+0)

Due to the current health restrictions, this session will take place entirely via Zoom Follow this link

Meeting ID: 884 7169 1230

Password: 746274

Abstract

“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country” says the Communist Manifesto, the same text which states that “The working men have no country” and ends with the famous call “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”. The ‘bourgeois cosmopolitanism’ was the object of critique in different texts authored by Marx (and Engels). Thus, Marx underlined that “political economy displays a cosmopolitan, universal energy which overthrows every restriction and bond, but comes out in its complete cynicism” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) and that “free competition and world trade gave birth to hypocritical cosmopolitanism and the notion of man”(German Ideology). However, Marx’s critique of ‘bourgeois cosmopolitanism’ was not formulated from a local or national perspective, but from the perspective of a radical cosmopolitics whose main elements, as this presentation argues, could be detected in (i) the immanent critique of “bourgeois cosmopolitanism” or of globalised capitalism, (ii) in the ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’ or in the emancipatory and transformational role of Marx’s radical critique, (iii) in the proletariat as a cosmopolitical agency from below, (iv) in the missing theory of state in Marx’s oeuvre, (v) in the stake on the transformation of consciousness and self-emancipation, and (vi) in Marx’s unavoidable humanism. In this radical cosmopolitics, cosmopolitan and communist horizons tend to become one, and the radical cosmo-communist politics appears as the real stake of struggle against global injustice, both in Marx’s time and now.

Musical Contagion and the Metaphorical Mind: What Music Teaches Us About Emotion
Federico Lauria (LanCog, University of Lisbon)

23 October 2020, 16:00 | The talk will be given in a mixed presence regime

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa
Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia) & live-streamed

Abstract: Music can infect us. For instance, listeners may feel sad because they perceive an Irish lament as sad. Contagion is central to musical experience and emotion regulation. What is it? What does it teach us about emotion? Many argue that contagion teaches us that the main theory of emotions as cognitive evaluations (cognitivism) is flawed. When feeling sad in response to sad music, we do not evaluate the music as unfortunate; nothing bad happened. According to the dominant picture, music contaminates us through mimicry independently of value appraisal (non-cognitivism). Against this trend, this paper proposes to rescue cognitivism from the musical challenge by offering a new account in terms of metaphor cognition: the value metaphor view. The main claim is that contagion is experiencing the music as a metaphor for emotions and for values, such as unfortunate things. Music “sounds like” emotions and values. This view can rebut the musical challenge to cognitivism. I motivate this account by arguing that non-cognitivism is poorly motivated and by making extensive use of empirical findings. As philosophers have neglected the ample empirical literature on this topic, this project fills an important gap.

Free Attendance, but preregistration required: https://www.lancog.com/lancog/registration/

What is Moving Right Now?
Elton Marques (LanCog, University of Lisbon)

16 October 2020, 16:00 | The talk will be given in a mixed presence regime

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa
Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia) & live-streamed

Abstract: In this talk, I put forth an answer to a scarcely discussed question concerning a particular view in the metaphysics of time, namely the Moving Spotlight Theory (MST). The main advantage of this theory lies in the fact that it introduces a clear view of the kind of nature that might correspond to the ‘moving spotlight’ responsible for the passage of time. More specifically, the account I shall defend in this talk clearly indicates what the spotlight model refers to. The main goal of the talk is not the defense of the moving spotlight theory in itself, but rather an approach for understanding the metaphor at the core of this theory. To achieve this purpose, I will promote the union of two components: a) the idea that the present is the awareness of our mental states, and b) the idea that the flow of such an awareness of our mental states should correspond to the passage of time and to the spotlight itself. I purport to show what is required to satisfy the concept of the ‘spotlight’ in an illuminating way and address anticipated difficulties.

Free Attendance, but preregistration required: https://www.lancog.com/lancog/registration/

Reading Group within the Praxis-CFUL activities

Working language: English

Convener: Tamara Caraus ([email protected])

Argument: Currently, visibility and the fact of being visible acquire an unprecedented importance: ‘views’ on social media are becoming a source of self-esteem and self-respect for the users, the increasing number of ‘views’ acquires economic value, and the notions such as ‘economy of attention’ are being advanced to capture the new reality of economics. Apart from social media, the proliferation of reality shows display a need to be seen of ‘ordinary’ persons, as though striving to have the ‘15 minutes of fame’ (anticipated by Andy Warhol). Concomitantly, the main political stake of political actions now is to make the injustice visible. In the logic of protest movements and ‘occupations’, if we are to register and respond rightly to conditions of suffering and injustice, these conditions must be visible. The different needs of being visible generate some puzzling questions concerning ethics and politics of visibility: Is the fact of being visible a kind of ontological guarantee of person’s being? If we inhabit a world in which visibility is shaped by structures of domination, and in which individuals’ capacities for ethical perception and judgment are often substantially compromised by the existent power, do those who are less visible have less ‘being’? Is the contemporary situation a tragicomic reversal of the Benthamic-Orwellian notion of the panopticon society in which we are (potentially) observed all the time and have no place to hide from the omnipresent gaze of the Power, since today anxiety arises from the prospect of not being seen? Can the maxim ‘I think, therefore I am’ be replaced by “I am looked at, therefore I am?’, etc. In order to answer these questions, the proposed Reading Group aims to go back to the authors who (attempted to) identify Being with appearing (Heidegger and Arendt), examined the ‘dialectics’ of visible and invisible (Merleau-Ponty), described the need for the Other’s gaze serving as the guarantee of the subject’s being (Lacan), defined politics as re-distribution of the sensible and the visible (Ranciere) and offered a critique of the ‘pornographic age’ (Badiou).

Meetings& Readings:

Session I – 27 February 2020: Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press (translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt), Chapter 4, pp. 98 – 210.

Session II – 15 October 2020: Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Harcourt, New York and London, 1978 (volume 1 and 2 combined), Vol. 1 Chapter I “Appearances” and Chapter II “Mental Activities in a World of Appearances”, pp. 19-129.

Session III – 29 October 2020: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Edited by Claude Lefort, translated By Alphonso L. Ngis) Northwestern University Press, 1968; Michel Henry, Seeing The Invisible.(Translated by Scott Davidson), Continuum 2009, p. 5-12.

Session IV – 12 November 2024: Jacques Lacan, “Of The Gaze As Objet Petit a” In The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan) Norton, 1981, pp. 67 – 123.

Session V – 26 November 2020: Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement (translation by Julie Rose), University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Session VI – 10 December 2020: Alain Badiou, The Pornographic Age (translated by A. J. Bartlett, J. Clemens) Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Session VII: 14 January 2021: Round-Up meeting: Is an Ethics and Politics of Visibility Possible? Visibility versus Recognition?

Some other readings of these and other authors may be added, according to the development of the theme from the suggested titles.

Steven Gouveia

University of Minho

Altruísmo eficaz: Uma análise crítica

20 October 2020, 18h00

Update: The session will take place entirely via Zoom. Here the link

ID Meeting: 820 4735 9419

Password: 424573

Abstract

Imagine a seguinte situação: está a passear tranquilamente por Lisboa e decide apanhar o metro. Aguardando que o mesmo chegue, repara que uma senhora idosa que por ali passava tinha acabado de cair na linha do metro. Pior que isso, o metro vai chegar em um minuto. Salvar a senhora é possível, mas terá de sair do seu conforto para a salvar de ser atropelada. Dado que é não é uma pessoa moralmente repreensível, percebe que o correcto a fazer é socorrer a senhora e decide, assim, levantar-se para a auxiliar a subir para a plataforma do metro e garantir a sua segurança. E se soubesse que pode salvar muito mais pessoas do que apenas nesta situação particular, sem perder nada de moralmente significativo, mas somente alterando algumas atitudes da sua vida? Nesta palestra, iremos discutir um conjunto de ideias com a denominação de “Altruísmo Eficaz”, uma abordagem baseada no pensamento de Peter Singer, um dos intelectuais mais influentes da actualidade. Analisaremos os principiais pressupostos, as suas variadas aplicações (e.g. pobreza, ética animal, caridade) assim como as suas principias críticas e objeções, concluindo que estas parecem mais promissoras se aplicadas a uma versão “forte” do Altruísmo Eficaz, acabando por defender que uma defesa “fraca” do mesmo poderá ser pragmaticamente mais viável.

Knowledge-first account of group knowledge
Domingos Faria (LanCog, University of Lisbon)

9 October 2020, 16:00 | The talk will be given in a mixed presence regime

Abstract: In this talk, we want to relate two trending topics in contemporary epistemology: the discussion of group knowledge and the discussion of knowledge-first approach. In social epistemology of group knowledge no one has yet seriously applied and developed Williamson (2000)’s theory of knowledge-first approach. For example, explanations for group knowledge, as presented by Tuomela (2004), Corlett (2007), Gilbert (2014), and Lackey (2020), assume that knowledge is analyzed in terms of more basic concepts, such as group belief, group justification, and so on. However, if Williamson (2000)’s theory is correct, these are not good explanations for understanding group knowledge. Thus, we want to analyze what consequences Williamson (2000)’s theory has for social epistemology, namely for an understanding of group knowledge. We argue that a consequence of knowledge-first approach for understanding group knowledge is to account for factive mental states at collective level (in ways that are not reducible at individual level). So it is necessary to provide and develop a plausible understanding of collective minds and collective mental states in a non-reductionist way.