1st International Conference of the Humanities Uab
Legacies and Challenges
Lisbon, June 6 & 7, 2023 | Palácio Ceia
Org. Universidade Aberta | Department of Humanities
Presentation
“The defense of the humanities is not primarily the celebratory memorialising of the past and of its cultural, linguistic, literary and artistic patrimony. Sustained and illuminated by that memory and by the study of that patrimony, the humanities should be, in school and in life, arches in the dome of the future. A future in which mankind is not post-human”. (Vítor Aguiar e Silva, «Nota Preambular». As Humanidades, os Estudos Culturais, o Ensino da Literatura e a Política da Língua Portuguesa, Coimbra, Almedina, 2010)
The cornerstone of a pressing contemporary debate, reflection on the relevance of the Humanities has gained increasing urgency.
The questions that emerge from what many call the “crisis of the humanities” – a crisis of legitimation, whose symptoms extend far back in time and stem from an intricate web of causes – will be the central object of this 1st International Conference of the Humanities UAb. The focus of the conference falls on the crisis within the very concept of “human,” evident in the current terms of “post-humanism” and “trans-humanism,” in order to lead the debate back to its point of departure: initiating and consolidating a cultural judgment that allows us to reflect constructively on the legacies and on the challenges of the Humanities, which preside over the conference title.
It is, therefore, the objective of the conference to foster a thinking that does not dispense with the historical heritage of the Western world, opening itself to the new challenges and trends of the contemporary world, from the need to widen the geographical space of reflection to the relevance and implications of its cultural memory, as well as the recognition of the necessary intermingling and complementarity of disciplines.
This meeting aims, in short, to be a space for dialogue about the traditional cartography of knowledge directed towards an ontology of the human that favors effective cooperation among diverse scientific domains, with a view to identifying goals at once desirable and possible.
Subscribing to the position of Aguiar e Silva, in the epigraph to this conference, about the future of the humanities, we welcome proposals for papers in the most diverse areas of the humanities (from fields such as literature and the arts, linguistics and rhetoric, philosophy and culture, communication and information studies, and comparative studies, among others), according to the thematic lines listed in the call for papers.