Mário Ferreira dos Santos (1907–1968) is, in sheer scale of output, the largest systematic philosophical project ever attempted in Brazil. His Encyclopaedia of Philosophical and Social Sciences, planned in more than fifty volumes, is an undertaking without parallel in Brazilian intellectual history — and rare even in the international context of the 20th century, in which academic philosophy progressively abandoned systematic form.

Whatever limitations one may identify in the work — and they exist —, Mário Ferreira’s project deserves serious academic examination: for its scope, its theoretical ambition and the singular position it occupies between Thomist scholasticism, Pythagoreanism, phenomenology and the German dialectical tradition. This article presents the life, the work and the central doctrine — Concrete Philosophy — with critical rigour and without hagiography.

1. Life and formation

1.1 Trajectory

Mário Ferreira dos Santos was born in Tietê (state of São Paulo) on 3 January 1907 and died in São Paulo on 11 April 1968. Son of the Portuguese immigrant Francisco Dias Ferreira dos Santos — a pioneer of cinema in Brazil — he moved as a child to Pelotas (Rio Grande do Sul), where he received part of his education at a Jesuit school. He studied law without completing the degree, worked as a journalist, was politically active (in his youth in far-left currents; later in conservative positions), translated European authors for São Paulo publishing houses, and progressively devoted all his free time to philosophy.

He had no regular academic training in philosophy. He taught himself — Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian — and systematically read the classics in the original. This condition of an erudite autodidact is central to understanding his work: neither entirely outside the academy (since he read everything and cited extensively), nor inside it (since he never submitted himself to the university rituals of validation).

1.2 The intellectual environment

The Brazil of the mid-20th century was experiencing the academic establishment of philosophy. USP (University of São Paulo), founded in 1934, had imported French professors (Jean Maugüé, Martial Gueroult, later Gérard Lebrun) who fixed a style: close reading of a single author, historical monograph, refusal of systematic ambition. Mário Ferreira does exactly the opposite: he produces first-person philosophy, on an encyclopaedic scale, refusing the academic division of labour.

This opposition partly explains why his work circulated parallel to the university — among self-taught readers, esoteric circles, certain Catholic milieus, and later among readers shaped by Olavo de Carvalho — without finding a place in official curricula.

2. The work: scope and organisation

2.1 The Encyclopaedia

The Encyclopaedia of Philosophical and Social Sciences was planned in at least 51 volumes, of which around 40 were published during the author’s lifetime. It includes, among others:

  • Philosophy and Worldview (1952) — general introduction
  • Treatise on Economics (3 volumes)
  • Logic and Dialectic (several volumes, including the Symbolic Logic)
  • Theory of Knowledge
  • Analysis of Social Themes
  • Treatise on Sociology
  • Philosophy of Crisis
  • Man Before the Infinite (Theology)
  • Ontology and Cosmology
  • Concrete Philosophy (3 volumes — the central work)
  • Concrete Philosophy of Values
  • Logical and Dialectical Methods (3 volumes)
  • Treatise on Schematology
  • Dictionary of Philosophy and Cultural Sciences (4 volumes)
  • Pythagoras and the Theme of Number
  • Commented translations of Aristotle (Organon, parts of the Metaphysics), Plato, Plotinus (Enneads), Boethius.

2.2 The commented translations

One of Mário Ferreira’s lasting legacies is the commented translations of classics. His versions of Aristotle’s Organon, Plotinus’ Enneads, Plato’s dialogues came with extensive commentaries that reorganised the text in light of his systematics. For generations of Brazilian readers without Greek, these editions were the gateway to classical philosophy.

The philological quality varies: in some places it is accurate; in others, the commentaries go beyond the text. But the pedagogical function is undeniable, and several of these translations remain in circulation.

3. Concrete Philosophy: central doctrine

3.1 What “concrete” means

The name Concrete Philosophy is deliberately opposed to abstract philosophy — one that starts from isolated concepts and manipulates them apart from the real. For Mário Ferreira, the “concrete” is, etymologically, the cum-crescere: that which has grown together, the entity in its totality of relations. Concrete philosophy seeks, therefore, not to isolate the entity from its nexus, but to examine it within the web of its necessary connections.

The inspiration is threefold:

  1. Aristotelian-Thomistic: the ontology of substance, act and potency, the four causes.
  2. Pythagorean and Neoplatonic: the mathematical structure of the real, the doctrine of the One, the hierarchy of planes.
  3. Hegelian dialectic (in his own key): thought as a movement that grasps the real in its internal contradictions.

3.2 First principles

Concrete Philosophy sets out to establish universal a priori principles — truths that cannot be denied without contradiction and which structure all reality. Among them:

  • Principle of identity: what is, is what it is.
  • Principle of non-contradiction: being cannot both be and not be in the same respect.
  • Principle of sufficient reason: everything that is has a reason for being.
  • Principle of finality: every action tends towards an end.
  • Principle of participation: the many participate in the one; the particular participates in the universal.
  • Principle of the analogy of being: being is neither univocal (said in the same way of everything) nor equivocal (said by mere chance of homonymy), but analogical (said proportionally).

From these principles, Mário Ferreira attempts to reconstruct the various regions of the real: cosmology, anthropology, ethics, sociology, economics, aesthetics.

3.3 The theory of tensions

One of the most original elements is the theory of tensions: every entity is constituted by pairs of opposites in dynamic tension — finite/infinite, act/potency, unity/multiplicity, rest/motion. There is no entity without tension, and tension is not disorder, but the very form of reality. It echoes Heraclitus (“the harmony of opposing tensions”) and Pythagoreanism, but Mário Ferreira develops it as a systematic category.

This theory runs through the whole work: the Philosophy of Crisis applies it to history; the Treatise on Economics, to social relations; the Concrete Philosophy of Values, to ethics.

4. Logic and dialectic

Mário Ferreira devoted at least six volumes to logic. His project is to integrate:

  • Classical Aristotelian logic: syllogistic, categories, principles.
  • Symbolic logic: modern formal notation (Russell, Whitehead), treated as a continuation, not a rupture, of Aristotelian logic.
  • Dialectic: treated as the logic of movement, complementary to formal (static) logic. Dialectic is not the “logic of contradiction” in the radical Hegelian sense, but the study of the real oppositions that structure thought about the entity in mutation.

Logic and Dialectic and the three volumes of Logical and Dialectical Methods are, today, rarely read — but they represent a serious attempt to unify classical logic, symbolic logic and dialectic in a single doctrinal body. This kind of synthesis is unusual: the analytical tradition and the continental dialectical tradition generally ignore each other.

5. Position in Brazilian philosophy

5.1 Singularity

20th-century Brazilian academic philosophy, shaped by the French of USP, privileged the historical monograph on a single author — Spinoza, Descartes, Kant — and distrusted systematic synthesis. In that landscape, Mário Ferreira is an anomaly: he seeks to do first-person philosophy in a complete system, refusing what he sees as the “minority status” of Brazilian philosophy vis-à-vis the European.

Other contemporary names with similar ambitions are rare: Vicente Ferreira da Silva (1916–1963), an original Heideggerian; Miguel Reale (1910–2006), with the Tridimensional Theory of Law; Stanislavs Ladusãns, in the Thomist register. None of them reaches Mário Ferreira’s encyclopaedic scope.

5.2 Reception

University reception was sparse during the author’s lifetime and marginal in the post-war period. The reasons are multiple:

  • Style: Mário Ferreira’s prose is dense, ramified, often programmatic, and cites extensively without rigorous critical apparatus. By the imported French academic standard, this seemed dilettantism.
  • Content: his explicit defence of classical metaphysics and Pythagoreanism stood out against the dominant neopositivist and phenomenological climate.
  • Political positions: the conservatism of the mature author distanced him from the São Paulo left-wing intelligentsia.
  • Institutional independence: he was not a university professor, did not supervise theses, did not form disciples in the academic sense.

The later rediscovery — especially through Olavo de Carvalho from the 1990s onwards — brought Mário Ferreira back into circulation, but in a polemical context that, paradoxically, made calm evaluation more difficult.

6. Philosophical merit

Independently of political sympathies or specific assessments, some merits are objective:

  1. Scope: few 20th-century philosophers, in any language, attempted such a broad encyclopaedic system. Fair comparisons would be Nicolai Hartmann or Karl Jaspers — not minor philosophers.
  2. Erudition: direct command of Greek and Latin, systematic reading of the classics in the original, knowledge of the entire Western tradition, of Eastern traditions (Vedantic, Taoist) and of mathematics.
  3. Integration: the attempt to articulate classical logic, symbolic logic and dialectic is methodologically bold.
  4. Pedagogy: the commented translations and introductory texts shaped readers. This effect is measurable.
  5. Originality of synthesis: the triad Aristotelianism + Pythagoreanism + dialectic, articulated by the “theory of tensions”, is an unusual and productive combination.

7. Limits and legitimate criticisms

With equal honesty, the limits must be named:

  1. Lack of modern critical apparatus: the work cites extensively but rarely engages with 20th-century secondary literature. Critical studies on Aristotle (Owen, Frede), Plotinus (Hadot, Bréhier), Aquinas (Gilson, Maritain) hardly enter Mário Ferreira’s horizon.
  2. Pretension to apodeictic demonstration: at various points, Mário Ferreira presents as “necessary” theses that are, more rigorously, defensible but undemonstrated metaphysical options. The ambition of Concrete Philosophy verges, in places, on systematic dogmatism.
  3. Lack of philological revision: as it was never academically edited, the corpus contains repetitions, internal contradictions and obscure dependencies on sources that would need to be mapped.
  4. Encyclopaedic inflation: fifty volumes necessarily imply more consistent parts (the Concrete Philosophy, the Logic, the Pythagoras) and weaker ones (some sociological and economic volumes that visibly date).
  5. Contaminated reception: in the last three decades, the author’s name has been enlisted into cultural battles that have little to do with the work. This polarised use makes calm reading difficult.

8. Conclusion: why still read

Mário Ferreira dos Santos is, alongside Vicente Ferreira da Silva, one of the two Brazilian philosophers of the 20th century who attempted original thought on a major scale. He is not, and need not be, a Heidegger or a Whitehead. He is what he is: an erudite systematiser, an implicit teacher of an entire generation, a link between late scholasticism and contemporary Brazilian thought.

Reading him today requires two dispositions: academic rigour, in order not to take as demonstrated what is thesis; and historical sympathy, in order to recognise that a systematic project, however imperfect, is rare and deserves examination on its own terms.

Whoever wishes to enter the work can begin with three entries:

  1. The Wisdom of Principles — a brief introductory exposition of Concrete Philosophy.
  2. Pythagoras and the Theme of Number — a synthesis of one of his great philosophical passions, with accessible classical erudition.
  3. Treatise on Schematology — perhaps the most original book of the set, on the formal structure of thought.

For those who work with Aristotle or with the perennial tradition, reading Mário Ferreira alongside contemporary readings such as those of Olavo de Carvalho — without confusing the two authors or ranking them hastily — allows one to map a Brazilian tradition of classical reading that today deserves serious university examination.

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