Ideas and ideals in times of disbelief: the place of culture

Abstract

This is the opening conference of The Night of Ideas 2018, which took place on January 25, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, commemorating the fifty years of May 1968. The event, an initiative of the French government, brought together more than forty cities in order to celebrate the flow of ideas between countries, cultures, themes and generations. At stake, the place of culture in the proposal of a platform of democratic coexistence between contradictory cultural views and sensibilities, identifying the viable points of convergence and mutual respect around the inevitable differences.