Phenomenology

Paulo Freire Born in Recife in 1921, amid the poverty of the Brazilian Northeast, Paulo Freire is the most cited and translated Brazilian thinker in the world, and the Patron of Brazilian Education. His philosophy was born of practice: in 1963, in the pioneering Angicos experiment, he taught rural workers to read in a few weeks with a method that joined the reading of the word to the reading of the world. Seen as a threat, he was imprisoned and exiled after the 1964 coup, passing through Bolivia, Chile, the United States, and Switzerland; he would return to Brazil only in 1980. He brought together phenomenology, Marxism, and existentialism in a theory that is at once a pedagogy and a political philosophy of emancipation. ...

Rodolfo Kusch Born in Buenos Aires in 1922, into a family of German origin, Rodolfo Kusch united philosophy and anthropology in a rare way: instead of thinking America from European books, he traveled through northwestern Argentina and the Bolivian highlands in extensive fieldwork, listening to Quechua and Aymara thought. From this experience arose a radical question: is European ontology really capable of comprehending the greater part of human experience? His answer turns on a distinction that Spanish — and Portuguese — allow with singular clarity: that between being (ser) and dwelling (estar). “Being” expresses the modern Western mode: to be something, to produce, to assert oneself, to project oneself. “Dwelling” expresses another way of inhabiting the world: to be here, rooted in the land, in the community, in the here-and-now — the mode proper to the human being of deep America. For Kusch these are two distinct and irreducible ontologies. ...

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. ...