Title: "Unified Descriptions"
By: Humberto Brito (IFL/FCSH)
Date: 6th June, 3 p.m.
Abstract: Aristotle's Poetics has been described over the centuries as an insightful treatise on literature. Despite the many differences amongst commentators since the Renaissance, there seems to have always been a large agreement regarding its conceptual significance. Traditionally, authors agree that the Poetics offers a theory of poetic mimesis, according to which tragedies exemplify a sort of literary paradigm the utility of which would rest, for Aristotle, on some ameliorative end at a communitarian level.
While the dissent concerning such theory of poetic mimesis seems to have stabilized in the last five decades, qualifications regarding the nature of this end vary according to different ways of describing the meaning of tragic catharsis. Nevertheless, however dressed by Aristotelian moral vocabulary they may usually arrive, nearly all of the traditional descriptions on this regard seem ultimately irreconcilable with Aristotle's ethical thinking, as Jonathan Lear perceptively showed in Katharsis (1992).
Perhaps for historical reasons, commentators have been typically trying to answer a platonic question (e.g. 'What is the ethical benefit of literature?'). We should then try to understand what kind of interest Aristotle could have had on a particular form of art - on a particular narrative technique - regardless of its putative ulterior benefit. Our claim is that such interest in poetry connected with tragic poets' descriptions of human action being significantly analogous to Aristotle's own descriptions of virtues. This may help to clarify Aristotle's need to explain why people agree on descriptions of possibilities independently of facts. It will be argued that this philosophical interest is to be found not only in the Poetics and the Nichomachean Ethics, but also on other Aristotelian contexts, such as Metaphysics, Rhetoric or Problemata. Finally, our discussion will focus the Aristotelian concepts of anagnorisis, mythos, and ethos, and on the difference between poetry and history.

Title: "Political rhetoric and political action. Towards a framework for the analysis of political institutions"
By: Gabriele de Angelis (IFL / FCSH)
Date: 12th May, 2:45 p.m.

Title: "Wittgenstein and Qualia" - Apresentação e comentário de um texto de Ned Block

By: Jorge Gonçalves e Daniel Ramalho (IFL / FCSH)
Date: 16th May, 2:30 p.m.

Title: "Existe Conhecimento a priori?" [Is there a  priori Knowledge?]
By: António Marques (IFL / FCSH)
Date: 21st January , 11 a.m.
Abstract:
Our talk on the a priori will consider how this concept is treated in recent philosophical literature. Some historical notes will be made, taking in consideration the classical kantian conception: independence of experience doesn’t mean: without any relation to the empirical. Although contemporary post-war context is rather sceptical about the possibility of a priori knowledge, some philosophers since the 70’s have revisited the topic and now it is easy to find clear pro and against positions. It will be discussed the kripkean distinction between contingent a priori truths and necessary a posteriori truths and we’ll try to show how the former are not simply epistemic operations, but true ontological knowledge. Al last it will be argued that a priori knowledge presupposes first-person knowledge about norms or rules that are to be seen as conditions of experience (theoretical or practical).

Title: "Formas de Consciência" [Forms of Conscience]
By: João Paulo Monteiro (IFL / FCSH)
Date: 30st January, 3 p.m.

Title: ‘Making as if to say’ as make-believe 
By: Luiz Carlos Baptista  (IFL / FCSH)
Date: 20th February, 11 a.m.
Abstract:
In this talk I discuss a number of problems for Grice’s notion of ‘making as if to say’, which in the end lead to a criticism of his conception of ‘saying’. However, I recognize that the contrast between ‘saying’ and ‘making as if to say’ has some intuitive appeal and so I propose to reframe the latter notion as ‘verbal make-believe’, focusing on the case of irony (taking a clue from Grice himself in his considerations of irony as involving pretense). Drawing on Austin’s distinction between the act of saying something (the locutionary act) and the act performed in saying something (the illocutionary act), as well as on Walton’s concept of ‘make-believe’, I claim that verbal make-believe should be understood as the performance, by the speaker, of a bare locutionary act, while pretending to perform an illocutionary act.

Title: The Problem of the Essential Indexical Revisited
By: Erich Rast  (IFL / FCSH)
Date: 19th March, 11 a.m.

Title: As Investigações Filosóficas como um "álbum" cultural" [The Philosophical Investigations as a cultural "Album"]
By: Ana Falcato (IFL / FCSH)
Date: 31st March, 11.30 a.m.
Abstract:
As it is generally known, the Philosophical Investigations are formally structured in a set of paragraphs numerically sequenced (Part I), and a more arbitrary group of thematic remarks (Part II). In the Prologue, in a justifying kind of way, Wittgenstein states that: «Thus this book is really only an Album». Taking it as an exhibition of a series of sketches, we can read (or see) the book as a collection of «pictures of thought». However, as I will argue, in a wider understanding of the Philosophical Investigations, the idea of an Album has deeper implications than the methodological ones. With a somewhat spenglerian inspiration, the book follows a sort of cultural-transcendental perspective in accordance to the organic model of a philosophical approach to forms of life which have a primary linguistic configuration.

Title: Juízos, Regras e Vida Quotidiana
By: Regina Queiroz (IFL / FCSH/ Univ. Lusófona)
Date: 9th April, 3 p.m.

Title: "Jogos Estéticos. Considerações a partir de Wittgenstein"
By: Nélio Conceição (IFL/ FCSH)
Date: 21st April, 11 a.m.

Abstract: Focusing on Wittgenstein’s 1938 lectures, transcripted by students and later compiled in the volume Wittgenstein’s Lectures and Conversations, this study intends to clarify the style of thought that Wittgenstein considers appropriate to aesthetics. The main purpose is to understand the theoretical and practical consequences of an aesthetical positioning within the scope of language games. This implies, on the one hand, the rejection of explicative / causal explanation for aesthetical phenomena and, on the other hand, the apology of a descriptive attitude aimed at “giving reasons” for those same phenomena. Wittgenstein’s aesthetics is not a theory in the traditional sense, it is not a closed system capable of circumscribing experiences and concepts; it is mainly a collection of remarks and conceptual dismantling intended to clarify language games.

Title:  "Impacto Racional" [Rational Impact]
By: Franck Lihoreau (IFL / FCSH)
Date: 23rd April, 11 a.m.

Title: "As noções de génio e espírito livre em Nietzsche depois do Nascimento da Tragédia"
By: Maria João Branco (IFL / FCSH)
Date: 28th April, 3 p.m.