Philosophy in Brazil

Period: 16th century–present | Context: Portuguese colonization and Jesuit education, Empire, Republic, the modern university (USP, 1934), military dictatorship, and redemocratization

Overview

The history of philosophy in Brazil is, to a large extent, a history of reception: European doctrines — scholasticism, French eclecticism, positivism, Germanism, phenomenology, structuralism — were successively adopted, adapted, and debated in institutions that, until the twentieth century, were not properly philosophical universities (Jesuit colleges, seminaries, law and medical schools, institutes). Brazilian philosophy can therefore be narrated only in close connection with the country’s institutional and political history.

As in Latin American philosophy (see Synthesis 16), the question “is there a Brazilian philosophy?” has accompanied the field since the nineteenth century. Historians’ answers have varied with the criterion adopted: doctrinal originality, continuity of a tradition, or the social function of ideas. This synthesis surveys the main currents, presents the central authors of each, and ends with that debate.

I. The Colonial Period: Jesuit Scholasticism

The Jesuits arrived in Brazil in 1549 with the fleet of the first governor-general, Tomé de Sousa, and organized colleges that, from the mid-sixteenth century, also offered the arts (philosophy) course. The pedagogical model was the Ratio Studiorum (1599), the Society of Jesus’s code of studies, and the philosophical course followed the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition.

The standard reference was the so-called Coimbra Course (Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis, the “Conimbricenses”), a set of commentaries on Aristotle’s works prepared at the Colégio das Artes in Coimbra and published between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Circulated throughout the Jesuit network, these manuals served philosophical formation in the Brazilian colleges. The scholasticism of the period, Thomistic in matrix and marked by the strong presence of Francisco Suárez (see Francisco Suárez) and Francisco de Vitoria (see Francisco de Vitoria) in Iberian juridical-theological thought, formed the intellectual horizon of the colony.

The expulsion of the Jesuits from Portuguese domains (1759), in the context of the Marquis of Pombal’s reforms, interrupted this teaching network. The Pombaline reform sought to replace scholasticism with an orientation shaped by the sciences and modern thought, but philosophical life in the colony remained limited and closely tied to the clergy.

II. The Nineteenth Century: Eclecticism and Spiritualism

Under the Empire, official philosophical thought was dominated by the spiritualist eclecticism of the Frenchman Victor Cousin, which shaped the education of the lettered elites and secondary schooling.

Friar Francisco de Monte Alverne (1784–1858), a Franciscan and sacred orator, taught philosophy in Rio de Janeiro and set out eclecticism in his Compêndio de Filosofia, becoming the teacher of an entire generation.

Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães (1811–1882), a disciple of Monte Alverne, wrote Fatos do espírito humano (1858) and A alma e o cérebro (1876), regarded as the first philosophical works of major scope produced under the Empire. Magalhães defended spiritualism against materialism and was also the introducer of Romanticism into Brazilian literature, with Suspiros poéticos e saudades (1836).

III. Positivism and the Republic

The positivism of Auguste Comte (see Synthesis 10 and Auguste Comte) had a singular reception in Brazil. Two strands can be distinguished: the diffuse influence of Comtean scientism among military officers, engineers, and physicians — such as Benjamin Constant (1836–1891), professor at the Military School and a key figure of republican propaganda — and orthodox positivism, organized around Miguel Lemos (1854–1917) and Raimundo Teixeira Mendes (1855–1927), who in 1881 founded the Positivist Church of Brazil, linked to Comte’s Religion of Humanity and to the guidance of Pierre Laffitte.

The political influence of positivism is visible in the proclamation of the Republic (1889): the motto “Ordem e Progresso” (“Order and Progress”) on the national flag derives from the Comtean formula that joins love as principle, order as basis, and progress as goal, and Teixeira Mendes and Miguel Lemos took part in conceiving the republican flag. The presence of positivism in the early Republic, especially in Rio Grande do Sul, is the subject of extensive historiography. An important caveat: the flag’s motto expresses an ideological influence, not a unanimous adherence of the Republic to positivism.

IV. The Recife School

Active between the 1860s and 1880s around the Recife Law Faculty, the Recife School represented a break with spiritualist eclecticism and an opening to the sciences and to German culture.

Tobias Barreto de Meneses (1839–1889), from Sergipe, is its leading name and the introducer of Germanism into Brazilian thought: he read and popularized authors such as Haeckel, Noiré, Jhering, and the Kantian tradition, defended a conception of law as a cultural phenomenon, and criticized Comtean positivism (see Tobias Barreto).

Sílvio Romero (1851–1914), a disciple and popularizer of Tobias Barreto, wrote A filosofia no Brasil (1878), one of the first attempts to reconstruct the history of philosophical ideas in the country, and the História da literatura brasileira (1888), in which he applies naturalistic and evolutionary criteria. The Recife School is also associated with the jurist Clóvis Beviláqua (1859–1944), author of the draft of the 1916 Brazilian Civil Code.

V. Spiritualism and Metaphysics: Farias Brito

Raimundo de Farias Brito (1862–1917), from Ceará, is regarded by many interpreters as the first Brazilian philosopher of a system. A critic of materialism and positivism, he developed a metaphysical spiritualism centered on the problem of consciousness and the meaning of the world, set out in the trilogy A Finalidade do Mundo (1895, 1899, 1905) and in O Mundo Interior (1914) (see Farias Brito). His work anticipates, in its own terms, the critique of scientism that the next generation would develop.

VI. Culturalism and Miguel Reale

Miguel Reale (1910–2006) is the central figure of the philosophy of law in Brazil and the main representative of Brazilian culturalism, neo-Kantian in inspiration, which understands law and morality as products of historical-cultural experience. His three-dimensional theory of law holds that juridical experience has three inseparable dimensions in dialectical implication — fact, value, and norm — in opposition to both pure normativism and sociologism (see Miguel Reale). Reale also promoted the institutionalization of the field through the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy (1949) and the Revista Brasileira de Filosofia.

VII. Thomism, Metaphysics, and Phenomenology in the Twentieth Century

Alongside the university, works of metaphysical and existential orientation developed:

Mário Ferreira dos Santos (1907–1968), a prolific author, proposed Concrete Philosophy, a system that seeks to synthesize the Pythagorean, Aristotelian, and scholastic traditions with dialectics and symbolics (see Mário Ferreira dos Santos). His work, long marginal to the academy, has received growing attention.

Henrique Cláudio de Lima Vaz (1921–2002), a Jesuit from Minas Gerais, trained in Rome and a professor at UFMG, developed a systematic philosophy of Thomistic, Platonic, and Hegelian inspiration, with a philosophical anthropology (Antropologia Filosófica I and II, 1991–1992) and a philosophical ethics (Introdução à Ética Filosófica I and II, 1999–2000). An adviser to Catholic youth movements in the 1960s, he is one of the Brazilian thinkers of greatest systematic reach (see Henrique de Lima Vaz).

Vicente Ferreira da Silva (1916–1963), from São Paulo, devoted himself first to modern logic and then to the reception of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, in works such as Exegese da Ação (1949), Dialética das Consciências (1950), and Teologia e Anti-Humanismo (1953). His late reflection, devoted to mythology, the sacred, and finitude, was central to the formation of Vilém Flusser (see Vicente Ferreira da Silva).

Gerd Bornheim (1929–2002), trained in existentialism and phenomenology, wrote Sartre: Metafísica e Existencialismo and Dialética: Teoria e Práxis, as well as studies on the Presocratics and on aesthetics and theater (see Gerd Bornheim).

Vilém Flusser (1920–1991), born in Prague and living in Brazil from 1940 to 1972, is the author of Língua e Realidade (1963) and, after his return to Europe, of Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (1983; Towards a Philosophy of Photography), in which he analyzes photography as a programmed “apparatus” and the technical image as a new paradigm of communication (see Vilém Flusser).

VIII. USP and the French Mission

The University of São Paulo, founded in 1934, hired French professors for its Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences, and Letters: the initial group included Étienne Borne (philosophy and psychology), and in 1935 young agrégés arrived such as Jean Maugüé (philosophy) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (sociology). The period of the French missions in USP philosophy runs from 1934 to the mid-1950s and was followed by a phase marked by the presence of Gilles-Gaston Granger, Martial Gueroult, and Victor Goldschmidt, who established technical standards of work. Later, Gérard Lebrun taught at USP for extended periods from 1960 onward.

The result was the consolidation of the so-called structural reading of philosophical texts, associated with Gueroult’s method — which examines the internal “order of reasons” of each system (Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons, 1953) — and with Goldschmidt, who valued rigorous analysis of the structure of arguments. This orientation trained generations of historians of philosophy (among them José Arthur Giannotti, Bento Prado Jr., and Marilena Chaui), with an emphasis on technical rigor and specialization.

Marilena Chaui (b. 1941), a specialist in Spinoza and author of Convite à Filosofia and of studies on ideology and culture, represents the continuation of this USP tradition with a critical and political orientation (see Marilena Chaui).

IX. Education and Critical Thought: Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) developed, from his experience of adult literacy work in the Northeast, a philosophy of education of phenomenological, existentialist, and Marxist inspiration. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), he criticizes “banking education” and proposes problem-posing, dialogical education grounded in conscientização (critical consciousness) (see Paulo Freire and Synthesis 16). He is the Brazilian thinker with the greatest international reception.

X. Is There a Brazilian Philosophy?

The debate has descriptive and normative dimensions.

João Cruz Costa (1904–1978), one of those responsible for organizing the USP philosophy department, published Contribuição à História das Ideias no Brasil (1956), whose subtitle links the development of philosophy in the country to national historical evolution. His thesis is that philosophical ideas in Brazil are, to a large extent, transplanted and can be understood only in light of the social and historical conditions in which they were adopted, rather than being judged by a standard of originality.

By contrast, Antônio Paim, in História das Ideias Filosóficas no Brasil (1967), reconstructs a succession of currents and authors as a tradition of its own, arguing for the continuity of Brazilian thought.

Paulo Arantes (b. 1942), in Um departamento francês de ultramar (1994), critically analyzes the formation of the USP philosophical culture and its tie to the French model of specialization. The book provoked controversy: Giannotti’s review, for example, suggests that Arantes generalizes an experience that would be his own or his generation’s.

This debate converses with the Zea/Salazar Bondy controversy over the authenticity of Latin American philosophy (Synthesis 16). The most common positions can be summarized thus: (1) philosophy in Brazil is the reception and adaptation of European models, without an autonomous tradition; (2) a Brazilian tradition can be reconstructed, with its own authors and problems; (3) the demand for originality is itself a questionable criterion, and what matters is the rigor and pertinence of philosophizing from one’s own circumstance.

Chronological Overview

See also

• Miguel Reale
• Henrique de Lima Vaz
• Vicente Ferreira da Silva
• Vilém Flusser
• Tobias Barreto
• Farias Brito
• Mário Ferreira dos Santos
• Gerd Bornheim
• Paulo Freire
• Marilena Chaui
• Synthesis 10: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
• Synthesis 16: Latin American Philosophy