Profile Information

The Nova Institute of Philosophy  (IFILNOVA) is a research unit of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas) of the New University of Lisbon (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and is supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science. The main purpose of IFILNOVA is to develop research programs in the current fields of philosophy of language, epistemology, argumentation theory, aesthetics, political philosophy and philosophy of mind. There is not, within the IFILNOVA, a single and strict philosophical (not to mention, ideological) orientation, although most of its research has, from a methodological point of view, an analytical approach.

From its beginning IFILNOVA has carried out some main strategic lines, which today continue to define its research framework:

1. developing philosophical research programs, designed and carried out by our research groups, to achieve measurable and objective outputs;

2. developing qualification and training programs for junior researchers,  both from Portugal and abroad;

3. intensifying theIFILNOVA network through concrete research and learning programs with international partners;

4.  developing interactions with other national research units;

5. developing the IFILNOVA library and our documentation centre.

IFILNOVA has defined three main objectives for the next years:

1. to become a leading unit by relevant contributing to the recent debate on the moral, political and juridical justification of fundamental rights in the context of contemporary globalization processes;

2. to become a leading unit in argumentation studies, namely by producing cutting-edge knowledge on practical reasoning involving values and argumentative decision-making processes;

3. to became a leading unit in the philosophy of artistic practices, namely by producing original knowledge on how non-aesthetic values can intertwine with aesthetical ones in order to shape artistic experience (film experience will be taken as one privileged case study).