CultureLab - Culture and Value Laboratory

The Culture and Value Laboratory (CultureLab) explores and analyses the relationship between value and culture, that is, the many ways in which human values and the human activity of valuing are always embedded in cultural forms of life, which have a given context and a history.  The CultureLab integrates twenty high level researchers and professors, who, since 2014, have published over twenty books (including authored and edited books), eighty papers, and seventy book chapters. At the CultureLab, their research on such topics as Art, Aesthetics, Nietzsche, Nihilism, Subjectivity, or Literature aims to contribute to an overarching research on Value(s) that takes into account the relationship between value and culture. This particular way of looking at the philosophical questions about Value(s) has a strong meta-philosophical dimension, given that the culture within which we value and reflect upon value is always co-determined and shaped by the history of philosophy and the philosophical construction of values. This makes the history of philosophy, as well as the relationship between philosophy and culture and philosophy and life, crucial for the CultureLab.

There are three research groups within the lab: 

1) Questions of Subjectivity: Philosophy and Literature, a group dedicated to the problem of how the concept of subjectivity has been created and elaborated, but also criticized and deconstructed, in the philosophical and literary traditions of the West.

2) Art, Critique and Aesthetic Experience, a group dedicated to the study of aesthetic values and their relation to artistic practices, and especially to the aesthetic experience of the city in the intersection between art and philosophy.

3) Lisbon Nietzsche Group, a group dedicated to the study of the works and thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the relevance of his legacy for our own time, especially the problem of nihilism and facing and analysing the contemporary crisis of values.