Estes dois textos sobre Lisboa desenvolvem temas tratados no âmbito do projecto «Fragmentação e Reconfiguração: A experiência da cidade entre arte e filosofia», em particular no programa de rádio «Ruas de Sentido Único», concebido por Maria Filomena Molder e os dois autores destes textos: Nuno Fonseca, que escreve sobre a paisagem sonora de Lisboa, e Nélio Conceição, que trata aqui das imagens e representações da cidade. Estes textos foram escritos pouco tempo antes de ser declarada a pandemia, que afectou significativamente o estado de coisas que eles descrevem, confirmando assim uma ideia presente no texto de Nuno Fonseca: a de que a paisagem sonora tem uma temporalidade dinâmica e uma historicidade.

Historian Francisco Bethencourt’s vast work on the history of racism (or rather racisms) is in many ways entangled with highly topical issues of identity, such as those linked to post-colonial theories and thought on decolonisation. This interview with the current holder of the Charles Boxer Chair at King’s College Department of History, in London, took the form of written questions and answers.

An important Italian thinker in the ‘autonomist’ tradition, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has written lucidly on the labour system and on how meaning and value are produced in the age of cognitive capitalism. This interview, conducted in Lisbon after a talk at the Teatro do Bairro Alto, takes us on a brief excursion through these theoretical territories.

François Hartog is a professor of Greek and modern historiography at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He is a historian who has also undertaken a substantial amount of important theoretic reflection on basic issues of historiography and the different ways of experiencing time that define each age. The thinking of history as a discipline and the actual concept of history are important contributions that Hartog has made and that extend to the entire field of human sciences.

During Franz Kafka’s lifetime (1883–1924), the situation changed with respect to the German language in Prague. In 1880, Prague and its suburbs still had almost 42,000 German-speaking inhabitants, some 15% of the total population. By 1900, the number had fallen to 33,776, or 7.5% of Prague’s population, including the suburbs. Of these 34,000 or so German speakers in Prague, an estimated 40% were Jews.

At the beginning, it is never the verb, always the question mark. We do it the correct way, using the right methodology. First we state the question. When is expressing an opinion a crime? Let me start by saying that freedom of expression, in the sense used by João Bénard da Costa in his book Muito Lá de Casa [A Very Domestic Issue] (a collection of articles about his beloved cinema), is, and has always been, ‘a very domestic issue’ as far as I am concerned. One of the above articles, ‘O Problema da Habitação’ [‘The Problem with Housing’], he ended with the following: ‘As Rui Belo wrote, “A house is the most serious thing in life.” And being closely attached to it is also very serious.’ Now let me move on to analysing the question I was asked, affirming my deep attachment to freedom of expression, in the sense set out in our constitution (and, one underlines, in the part relating to fundamental rights and duties), i.e., that everyone has the right to express and freely divulge their opinion through word, image or any other means, and the exercising of this right cannot be limited by any form of censorship. Without freedom of expression, the democratic, liberal and pluralistic state does not exist; in sum, open society, in its best and most fruitful sense, is non-existent.

This text, written by a professor of Media Philosophy at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, and research group coordinator into Artificial Intelligence, traces the history of algorithmic processes and shows that its history started well before the so-called Information Age. The writer discusses binary codes, algorithms, and digital calculus among other areas and concepts that have now become familiar to many people, despite the fact that only a few understand what they represent and mean.

Fake news, disinformation, a weak and shifting culture, the impossible task of regulation, private interests: Carla Baptista, lecturer and researcher in media history and the relationship between journalism and politics, looks at the factors behind the decline of journalism.

Yves Citton, a leading author on the ecology and economy of attention, follows a path in this article that is not the usual lament about the scarcity of attention in the face of an overabundance of information. Moving towards curiosity and subjecting it to a political re-evaluation, Citton creates an alternative theoretical discourse that is no longer focused on the problems of the crisis and the scarcity of attention.

This article by Margarida Abreu, economics lecturer at ISEG, Lisbon, focuses on theories of money and the monetary and financial system, in its complexity and the way that it involves a subjective dimension – trust. Among other things, we learn about how cryptocurrencies work and how we are moving towards a society in which hard cash is becoming obsolete.