Rethinking the City

Maria Filomena Molder is a Professor Emeritus at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and a researcher at IFILNOVA. Her philosophical interests converge towards aesthetical issues concerning poetry and art. Reading Dante, Kant, Goethe, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Pessoa, Broch or Colli, she has acquired the conviction that art and poetry are forms of knowledge of a generative kind: they allow us to see the very conditions under which reality is perceived, by granting us a presentation of it. Ever since the beginning of her research she has sought to demonstrate the fertility allowed by aesthetical issues towards the understanding of what philosophy can be. Nélio Conceição (PhD, NOVA University Lisbon, 2013) is a researcher at IFILNOVA (NOVA Institute of Philosophy). His research focuses on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, with recent work addressing topics within the philosophy of photography, film-philosophy, and the philosophy of the city. He has co-edited the volumes Aesthetics and Values: Contemporary Perspectives (Mimesis International, 2021), Conceptual Figures of Fragmentation and Reconfiguration (IFILNOVA, 2021) and Planos de pormenor: leituras críticas sobre a experiência da cidade (Húmus, 2023), and is the author of A realidade em exercício: a fotografia, da fenomenologia a Walter Benjamin (Edições do Saguão, 2023). Nuno Fonseca (PhD, NOVA University Lisbon, 2012) is currently a researcher at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA) and coordinates the “Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art” research group at CultureLab. He investigates various topics in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art both in the context of the arts and of everyday urban life. He has taught philosophy courses at NOVA FCSH and, since 2021, he co-teaches the course "Urban Aesthetics: Philosophy, art and the City". He has co-edited several books and authored chapters and articles on the city and urban experience, such as Planos de Pormenor (2023) and A cidade nas práticas artísticas (2023).

1. Introduction: The Ongoing Reconfiguration of the City Part I. Fragmentation and Reconfiguration: Urban and Historical Tensions 2. Cities of Memory and Ruins of the Present: Reflections in Wartime 3. My Schizoid City 4. Lisbon’s Phantom Limb Syndrome: Lineaments of Spectral Ethnography 5. The Ambivalences of Intimacy and Aesthetic and Political Reconfigurations of the Common World Part II. City, Place and the Political 6. From the Domus to the Urbs: The Place of Life 7. Navigating Marx’s Collective Praxis and Kierkegaard’s Individual Practice in the Swarming-Dream City of Capitalism 8. Contemporary Identity Politics and the City: More than Fragmentation Part III. Urban Experience, Aesthetic Concepts 9. Towards a Political Ecology of Urban Ambiances 10. Urban Life Scenes in Georg Simmel: Passages Between House and City 11. The Art of Dwelling as Tacit Philia Part IV. Cities, Fragments and the Arts 12. Odysseus Impounded: Lost Sailors, Lost Times, Lost Loves 13. Drifting through Lisbon in a Home Movie Archive 14. The Periphery Is Not Where the City Ends but Where It Begins to Unfurl. Contributions to an Architecture of the Metropolis from Renaudie and Gailhoustet to Druot, Lacaton and Vassal 15. On Some Fragments of Trás-os-Montes, a Film by António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro