Dates / Schedules
Tuesday, 12 January, 16 February, 9 March, 20 April, 18 May, 15 June 2027 7:00pm
Sessions held in Portuguese.
Conference
Talk
There are others in our lives — this is the starting point for this series. Over six sessions, António de Castro Caeiro proposes to explore the different forms of this “being with others”, through a series of questions about our relationships with them.
How do we draw closer to and distance ourselves from one another? Friendship brings us face to face with an “other self”; love allows two different people to share the same emotional atmosphere; the family, whether immediate or extended, presents itself as a first community. How do we experience the presence of those we call “our own”? The reflection also extends to recognising the other as an enemy and to the possibility of finding common ground amid hatred.
Intersubjectivity underlies every relationship with others, even when empathy is absent. Drawing on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Arendt, among others, the series places a paradox at the heart of its reflection. How can each person embody all of humanity and, at the same time, live in complete solitude?
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Programme
Session 1 — January 12
The Other from One’s Own Perspective
Others are those whom we believe to be alive, who have a life, who inhabit the sunlit side of existence. And who are we? On the moonlit side of life, seen from the perspective of the dead, are we the ghosts of those others? Are we, the living, the true ghosts of others? It is these others who make up our lives — not only after they have disappeared, but also when, upon their arrival, they leave behind a sky full of hope.
Session 2 — February 16
Another Self: Making, Having and Losing Others. Closeness and Distance
The elimination of distance turns the stranger into someone close to us, in the many senses of the term: someone we have never heard of, someone we have heard of, someone whose identity we know, an acquaintance, someone close, a friend, a brother. Being with another person allows for an even more radical possibility: that we cannot know ourselves without others who are special to us. The effect we have on other people’s lives. Misunderstandings, or shifts in emotional tone that give rise to disagreements. Forgetting how we once were. The almost complete distance between us, as it was in the beginning, when we were strangers to one another.
Session 3 — March 9
Enemies: The Other Side of Oneself. Hatred and Resentment, War and Peace
The enemy can be one’s own nemesis. One person wants another’s life, the other wants ours, and we ourselves want theirs. An active envy that seeks to drive the other out of their own life. If each person is driven by a burning desire, longing to have everything for themselves, how is it possible to live together or coexist with others driven by the same existential greed? Existential threat, enmity, rancour, hatred and resentment constitute one possible relationship between oneself and others. Is there any common ground for understanding, or do we pass one another by unnoticed? Is it war that seeks peace, and peace that prepares for war?
Session 4 — April 20
The Presence of Absence: The Abomination of Desolation and Communion
How does another person become part of our lives? When they arrive, they bring possibilities. Possibility takes shape in the future, opening an understanding of meaning where none existed before. When we lose someone so important that our life is shattered, rendered unrecognisable, time becomes filled with the absence of meaning, in a constriction of time itself. It is not that little time remains: rather, all of time remains, with me still here, without the person who mattered so profoundly that they were the very root of my own existence. The recurring reminder of that absence cancels out humanity as a whole — and, with it, the very possibility of being alone, waiting for someone.
Session 5 — May 18
The Invisible and Active Indifference
Our lives are inhabited by the existence of others, yet they are reduced to a lack of emotional significance, or so it seems. And yet our lives depend on them. The invisible are those who carry out the tasks that keep the city alive and functioning, providing us with all the services we need, even outside our working hours. In the same way, this is what we can be for others. We do not know what we do or how we contribute to keeping the city running. The same is true in the countryside, at sea, in factories, at home, working online and offline.
Session 6 — June 15
Drawing Closer (to One Another): Overcoming Indifference and the Possibility of Allowing Humanity to Manifest Itself in Each Person
The philosophical question concerning the meaning of the being of others leads to a complex broadening of this set of questions. Philosophy opens a horizon in which each of us is implicated in humanity — that is, in the totality of human beings, not only those alive today and our contemporaries, but also past and future generations. Our life is a “being-with-others”. Even if I were the only living human being, I would always be connected to another, who might never even have existed, or whose existence I might never have known about.
Prices and Discounts
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