Brazilian Philosophy

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. ...

In 1996, the Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho published a short, dense book titled Aristóteles em Nova Perspectiva: Introdução à Teoria dos Quatro Discursos (Aristotle in a New Perspective: Introduction to the Theory of the Four Discourses). Regardless of the controversies surrounding the author as a public figure, this book represents his most philosophically articulate contribution and deserves to be examined on its own terms. Its central thesis — that Aristotle’s Organon, together with the Rhetoric and the Poetics, forms a unified hierarchy of four types of discourse — engages real problems in the history of philosophy and shares ground with contemporary neo-Aristotelian readings by Pierre Aubenque, Enrico Berti, Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum. ...

Farias Brito Raimundo de Farias Brito (1862–1917), born in the state of Ceará, is regarded as one of the most original thinkers in Brazilian philosophy of his period. At a time dominated by positivism and a scientifically inspired materialism, Farias Brito developed a spiritualism of his own, in which consciousness is taken as the fundamental reality and as the true starting point of philosophical reflection. His strongly metaphysical work is directed against the reduction of reality to mere material mechanism and seeks to place the problem of spirit once more at the centre of philosophy. Although less read outside specialist circles, he exerted a lasting influence on the Brazilian Catholic and spiritualist thought of the following generations. ...

Gerd Alberto Bornheim (1929–2002), born in Caxias do Sul, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, was one of the principal introducers and interpreters of existentialism and phenomenology in Brazil. His intellectual activity spanned a broad field: beyond existentialism, he devoted himself to dialectics, to the study of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, and to the philosophy of art and theatre. A professor at several institutions—among them the USP, the UFRGS, the UERJ and the PUC—he played a decisive role in the philosophical formation of several generations. His writing combines expository clarity with conceptual rigour, which made works such as his introduction to philosophising and his study of Sartre standard reading for philosophy students across the country. ...

Henrique Cláudio de Lima Vaz, S.J., was born in Ouro Preto (Minas Gerais) on 24 August 1921 and died in Belo Horizonte on 23 May 2002. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1938, studied philosophy at the Jesuit scholasticate in Nova Friburgo and, from 1945, in Rome, where he earned a licentiate at the Pontifical Gregorian University; he was ordained a priest in 1948 and took his doctorate in philosophy at the same institution in 1953, with a thesis on dialectic and contemplation in Plato. He is regarded as one of the most important Brazilian philosophers of the twentieth century for the systematic reach of his work. ...

Marilena Chaui Marilena de Souza Chaui (born 1941 in São Paulo) is one of Brazil’s most influential living philosophers and professor emerita at the University of São Paulo, where she trained and spent her entire teaching career. Her work brings together a deep command of Spinoza’s philosophy and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with a critical, politically engaged reflection on Brazilian society. A staunch defender of the public university and a leftist intellectual, Chaui has also become a major public figure without ever relinquishing academic rigour. Her textbook Convite à Filosofia (1994) is among the most widely read introductions to philosophy in Brazil, and her reading of Spinoza, consolidated in A Nervura do Real, is an internationally recognised contribution to scholarship on the Dutch philosopher. ...

Mário Ferreira dos Santos Mário Ferreira dos Santos was the most prolific Brazilian philosopher of the 20th century, author of more than fifty works seeking to build a comprehensive philosophical system — known as Concrete Philosophy — synthesising the classical Western tradition (especially Pythagoreanism, Aristotle, and Scholasticism) with original contributions in ontology, mathematics, symbolism, and theory of knowledge. Key Concepts Concrete Philosophy: The name Ferreira dos Santos gave to his systematic project. It stands opposed both to the abstract logicism of the analytic tradition and to existentialist subjectivism. The “concrete” is reality considered in the fullness of its determinations — neither raw empirical data nor pure abstraction, but the dialectical synthesis of both. Tension of Tensionals (Tensão dos Tensionais): The central concept of Ferreira dos Santos’s ontology. Reality is structured by tensions (tensionais) that dynamise each other without cancelling each other out. Every being is a composition of opposites in dynamic tension — echoing dialectics and Pythagoreanism. This tension is not logical contradiction but the constitutive dynamic principle of the real. Concrete Universal: Influenced by Hegel, but in an original way: the universal is neither merely abstract (valid for all but emptied of content) nor merely particular (singular and unrepeatable). The concrete universal preserves the richness of individual determinations while revealing the common ontological structure. Mathematics and Ontology: Ferreira dos Santos sees in mathematics — especially number theory and Pythagorean proportion — a key to understanding the structure of the real. The relation between unity and multiplicity, finite and infinite, is addressed both mathematically and ontologically in works such as Tratado de Simbólica and Filosofia e Cosmovisão. Encyclopaedia of Philosophical and Social Sciences: A multi-volume encyclopaedic project encompassing logic, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of nature, philosophy of culture, sociology, and philosophical psychology. A testament to the author’s systematic ambition. ...

Miguel Reale Miguel Reale was born in São Bento do Sapucaí (São Paulo state) on 6 November 1910 and died in São Paulo on 14 April 2006. A law graduate of the Largo de São Francisco Faculty, he was a full professor at the University of São Paulo, of which he was twice rector (1949–1950 and 1969–1973), and held chair 14 of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1975 until his death. He is regarded as the most influential Brazilian philosopher of law of the twentieth century and one of the leading representatives of Brazilian culturalism. ...

Tobias Barreto Tobias Barreto de Menezes (1839–1889), born in the province of Sergipe, was a jurist, philosopher, critic and poet, recognised as one of the central figures of the so-called Recife School. In a Brazilian intellectual landscape dominated by an eclecticism of spiritualist inspiration, Tobias Barreto championed the introduction of “Germanism”—that is, German culture, science and philosophy—as a renewing alternative to the prevailing thought of the time. He drew close to monism and evolutionism, engaging critically with authors such as Haeckel, and turned against the dominant spiritualism. His most enduring contribution lies in the philosophy of law, where he defended a conception of law as a cultural and historical phenomenon rather than as the expression of a natural order. ...

Vicente Ferreira da Silva Vicente Ferreira da Silva was born in São Paulo on 10 January 1916 and died in the same city on 19 July 1963, aged 47, in a car accident. He graduated in law from the Largo de São Francisco Faculty of the University of São Paulo but never practiced, devoting himself entirely to philosophy. Although his formal academic life was discreet, he acted as a cultural organizer and was one of the most original Brazilian philosophers of the mid-twentieth century. ...

Vilém Flusser Vilém Flusser was born in Prague, then Czechoslovakia, on 12 May 1920, and died on 27 November 1991 in a car accident near the Czech–German border while traveling to give a lecture in Prague. Born into a Jewish family, he began his studies in Prague in 1938; with the Nazi occupation he left the city in 1939 for London and, in 1940, emigrated to Brazil, where he became a Brazilian citizen. A significant part of his family fell victim to Nazi persecution, an experience that marked his reflection on exile, language, and belonging. ...