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This essay is a collection of reflections about the practice of learning and teaching philosophy. It starts from a personal experience, presuming it will interest other teachers and researchers in this area. Its aim is to demonstrate the intimate link between study, research and teaching. Both at high school and at the university, the teacher should invite his students to think autonomously, by plunging them in the floating domain of questioning and providing them with the adequate tools. Although using different methodologies, according to the students' maturity, the philosophy teacher cannot abdicate from being a philosopher, which means a constructor of worlds, someone who thinks freely, in a permanent dialogue with the universe of culture and tradition.

Robert Nozick finishes Anarchy, State and Utopia with the idea of a utopia where a minimal state would allow the social organization of the most different ways of life. Even if the framework is libertarian, the individual communities could reject laissez-faire market transactions or liberal democracy. Different people have different desires and some would valorize security instead of liberty, or socialism instead of capitalism. Nozick holds that the minimal state, as a framework for utopia, is an inspiring view because it guarantees that the individuals' rights would remain inviolable, allowing them to choose freely what they want to do with their lives. Should this libertarian idea be exported to the organization of different communities? Or does a larger state have some kind of importance to preserve its members' rights? Also, is it possible to understand political liberalism without the state? This is the starting point for our reflection on the role of the state in ensuring pluralism and liberty among individuals and groups. One common assumption is that pluralism or liberalism is incompatible with “perfectionism” i.e. that the state avoiding to support any particular conception of the good life is the only or the best guarantee of liberalism. Tolerance for different ways of grasping the truth or the respect for the lights in others minds is not enough but the liberal State must be grounded in the absence of any belief or truth in both the moral and political realms. Max Weber’s sociological work long ago defined the modern state as necessarily coercive. It was defined by the monopoly of violence inside a country. Even now his definition of the state is widely shared among sociologists and political theorists. But Max Weber’s conception also carried, or went hand-in-hand with the threat of relativism, and fell victim to or was inspired by an epistemological conception that ends with equal treatment for both good and bad people. In this paper we intend to explore the connection between truth and politics and return to a more ancient alternative account of the legitimacy of coercion that goes back to Aristotle’s idea of the polis as a collective venture, and question its applicability to the modern world. Our main contention is that the polis’s purpose to provide for human excellence and not just as an arena offering political protection to free market capitalists should not be lightly discarded.

One of the main challenges presented to the Egyptian pharaohs of the Middle Empire was to hold the incursions of the nomad tribes (the "sand runners") through the oriental border of the Delta, which had, in previous periods, disturbed the social and administrative order of the Egyptian state. In order to do so, they built a defensive line of fortresses near Sinai (the so called "Wall of the Prince") and the military expeditions multiplied in the region. Down South, the Lower Nubia was integrated in the Egyptian territory and in the area of the second cataract of the Nile and there were also built several fortresses throughout the region. These, however, seem to have overpassed the strictly military purposes. The analysis of these structures seems to indicate that there was, in fact, a different kind of concerns and objectives: the fortress line of Kush (designation of Nubia in Egyptian language), area of a great concentration of fortresses, had a double purpose: to control the goods coming from the Nubian mines and from the South (jewelry, leopard fur, ivory, etc.) and to mark the effectiveness of the Egyptian power over the Nubians and Nubia. In this sense, the old fortress of Buhen – the first one to be built in the Dynasty XII, in the reign of Senuseret III, around 1860 B.C., on the left bank of the Nile – is a good example, of an enormous strategic value, that facilitated the control of the caravans and the vessels of goods transport, due to the narrow width of the river in that area, that allows us to characterize the action of the pharaohs of the period.

The English rose has a long tradition in Britain as a national symbol, largely for being a metaphor applied to a woman who has a natural beauty and a strong character. In the Victorian age, the language of flowers conveyed an acknowledged social and moral code, and floral symbolism was widely used in the arts. In a time ruled by industrialisation, the Ruskinian "go to Nature" precept inspired not only Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism but ordinary women who longed to turn their home into a paradise as well as a garden, where they could play the part of angel and queen. Thus, a neo-Victorian perspective can reinterpret this idealisation of social roles as being close to identities with a subversive potential for giving a voice to those who could not otherwise make themselves heard. In sum, floral representations, both in the literal and the figurative sense, contribute to a better understanding of Victorian and contemporary British culture. This essay therefore aims to link gender and identity questions with cultural history.

Universidade Católica is one of the cultural institutions, which is considered as one of the "founders" of the Associação Casa Veva de Lima, a cultural association jointly created by Maria Ulrich and the Câmara Municipal de Lisboa in order to keep alive the literary salon of her Mother, the writer Veva de Lima.

Recalling the centenary of the first vote cast by a woman, Carolina Beatriz Ângelo, in Portugal, we intend to mark the occasion by placing it within the context of domestic and foreign backgrounds related to the issue of female suffrage. Through the attendance of British feminists in Portugal, or by way of the voices and echoes of their positions, the Anglo-Portuguese framework in light of women's suffrage will be highlighted, as well as the historical event of May 28, 1911, which, despite having occurred in Lisbon, saw its frontiers being largely broadened. The Pankhurst family, in particular, was the recipient of harsh and unfair criticism from the detractors of suffragism and feminisms, even though there were also those who dared to raise their voices in its defense. Thus, we attempted to underline some of the most iconic excerpts, so as to define the contours around which the dispute took place, both in the UK and abroad.

This article focus the topic of the separation and lack of harmony between the epistemological theories of Sciences and Humanities, which for centuries has divided both our society and the academic world. It also mentions the contemporary challenges the Humanities are facing, concluding that they are in a privileged position to grant a nowadays very necessary conscious knowledge of the history of ideas, the formation of identities and the creation of a common imaginary. References are also made to the increment of networks between researchers, the building of bridges with other sciences and the shattering of disciplinary barriers, concluding that there has been a contribution of the Digital Humanities, which stimulate mutual acknowledgment and help the crossing of linguistic and geographic frontiers. Another of the objectives of this essay is to analyze the "epistemological rupture", the crisis of the paradigm of scientific rationality and to reevaluate the pertinence between knowledge and power. One can conclude that the social and economic forces, which were influenced by scientific knowledge, have contributed to institute the primacy of science. Thus when they traced the trajectory for the future, they did not consider any transforming possibilities that do not identify themselves with scientific knowledge and that ended the monopoly of science. When we reflect on our current world and look for solutions for its problems, we must abandon a mechanic, reductionist and linear paradigm for one that is dynamic, open and interdisciplinary. Among the several theorists who reflected on this topic, references are made to Bertrand Russell, Theodor Adorno, C. P. Snow, E. O. Wilson, Dorian Sagan and Paul Feyerabend. With the intent of promoting the Humanities, and of proving that the contemplation of great works of art from the past can make us reflect on scientific questions - and that, till the 17th century, art and science were "united", as many painters then knew about optics, anatomy and natural sciences – the article ends with an evocation of the great Francisco de Holanda.

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The theme of this Editorial was inspired by the celebration of the 20thanniversary of the establishment of the 1stMasterCourse on Women Studies in Portugal in 1995 and by the demise of Ana Vicente, whose action and intervention, both in the academic and social and religious life in our country, was extremely important in the fight for the defense of women ́s rights. When we analyze the impact of the theories produced in the area of Women Studies and its philosophy for the development of the Portuguese university and society, we see that itis irrefutable that they contributed to a change in the intellectual paradigm. There is, therefore, an alteration of the models, which are followed to organize knowledge in academic research as well as in scholarship in general and, obviously, in what concerns Women Studies itself. The objective of the implicit knowledge thus acquired is to establish a common ground between the different subject matters, thus having an impact in the development of the main fields of study. Among the bibliographical references, we mention Alex Castro, Nadya Aisenberg and Martha Nussbaum.

In this article, besides reflecting on the theme, the author raises the question concerning what the Jewish doctor and scientist of Portuguese origin Filipe Montalto (1567-1616), the painter and Catholic ambassador of German origin Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and the Queen Mother of France Maria de Médicis (1573-1642), three major personalities of Europe in the 16th century, had in common. The answer will be that each one of them in their own way – in the world of medicine, art and politics–practiced the art of conciliation. Therefore, in the end, they met in an ambitious project of peace promoted by Maria de Médicis, the Queen of France, who wanted to end the brotherly fights that fragmented even more a Europe, which was already deeply divided by the movements of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

This paper examines the origins and growing expansion of racism, eventually one of the most powerful social constructs within ideologies of hegemony with their regulatory function in determining which are and are not acceptable human social values and behaviors, categorized and hierarchized for the purpose of defining systems of power and privilege, inclusion and exclusion. It includes the discussion of one of its most perverse cognates, colorism that together with apparently less charged terms like xenophobia, chauvinism, and nationalism, partake the same germs of an ideology of white supremacy, hegemonic power, and privilege and can, unfortunately, be embraced even by its victims, anyone who finds himself/herself in a position of power, be it real or virtual.

By the use of the sciences, social sciences and pedagogical theories, this article explores different constructs to look at and analyze first and second language acquisition and language learning. The major focus will be on the complexity of language acquisition and that pedagogical principles to teach a second language are not enough to guarantee success in the classroom. Language acquisition is not a simple process, especially when income to language learning from a native language to a second language.