The Culture and Value Laboratory (CultureLab) explores and analyses the relationship between value and culture, that is, the many ways in which human values and the human activity of valuing are always embedded in cultural forms of life, which have a given context and a history. The CultureLab integrates twenty-six high-level researchers and professors, who, since 2014, have published over twenty books (including authored and edited books), eighty papers, and seventy book chapters. At the CultureLab, their research on such topics as Art, Aesthetics, Nietzsche, Nihilism, Subjectivity, or Literature aims to contribute to an overarching research on Value(s) that takes into account the relationship between value and culture. This particular way of looking at the philosophical questions about Value(s) has a strong meta-philosophical dimension, given that the culture within which we value and reflect upon value is always co-determined and shaped by the history of philosophy and the philosophical construction of values. This makes the history of philosophy, as well as the relationship between philosophy and culture and philosophy and life, crucial for the CultureLab.

There are five research groups within the lab:

1) Forms of Life and Practices of Philosophy, a research group dedicated to the study of the relationship between philosophy and the creation of values, forms of life and transformative practices, both at an individual and a collective level.

2) Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, a group dedicated to studying aesthetic values and their relation to artistic practices, especially to the aesthetic experience of the city in the intersection between art and philosophy.

3) Lisbon Nietzsche Group, a group dedicated to the study of the works and thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and the relevance of his legacy for our own time, especially the problem of nihilism and facing and analyzing the contemporary crisis of values.

4) Philosophy and Literature, a group created with the aim of developing and deepening questions related with the articulation between the two subject areas, raised by the History of Philosophy itself, and of gathering high-quality work done by members of Culture Lab over the past couple of years.

5) Research Group on Ancient Philosophy, whose purpose is to study the questioning of values ​​(such as the good, the beautiful and the true) in ancient philosophical thought and the way in which the reflection on values ​​throughout the history of the West was carried out through a constant reading of ancient texts.