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| Western philosophy 20th century philosophy 21st century philosophy |
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| Full name | Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho |
| Born | April 29, 1947 Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil |
| School/tradition | Conservatism |
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Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho (born April 29, 1947, in the city of Campinas, in the state of São Paulo) is a Brazilian journalist and writer. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, U.S.
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Early life
Olavo de Carvalho began working as a journalist before he turned 18. During the Brazilian military dictatorship, Carvalho was a member of the then outlawed Brazilian Communist Party, and protected fellow militants from the regime. [1]. He left the Party in 1968, and later, he gradually distanced himself both from the leftist world view and from politics in general. His right-wing views are now explicit. During that period, he began teaching philosophy to small classes. His published works from that period are short treatises, destined to his circle of students.
Career as a writer
He began writing and speaking to the general public at the urging of his friend, the poet Bruno Tolentino. His first major work is A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural (1993), a study on the flaws of the theories of Fritjof Capra and Antonio Gramsci, and a strong criticism of the welcome those thinkers had amongst the Brazilian intellectual elite.
His notoriety increased dramatically when he published O Imbecil Coletivo: Atualidades Inculturais Brasileiras (The Collective Imbecile: Brazilian Uncultural Actualities), in 1996. The work, essentially a collection of essays meant to display the mediocrity of Brazilian intellectuals, prompted many new admirers and haters.
In his subsequent book, O Jardim das Aflições (The Garden of Afflictions), Carvalho argues that there is a deep but so far unnoticed influence of Epicurus in Marx's thinking [2] , and shows how the advent of the modern thinking is creating a civil religion at the expense of the sacred traditions, especially Christianity.
Olavo de Carvalho is also the creator of Mídia Sem Máscara (Media Unmasked), a media-watch online journal in which he tries to address errors and omissions from what is usually seen by him and his contributors as a very strong leftist bias in the press.
The success led him to write in many Brazilian leading newspapers, such as O Globo, Jornal do Brasil and Folha de São Paulo, but his constant polemics made him to be fired. He came to live in the USA, establishing himself and his family in Virginia, where he works as an international correspondent for the São Paulo newspaper Diário do Comércio.
His works have brought him a number of admirers and a multitude of critics. The academy does not consider his work significant.[citation needed] Nonetheless he has expressed his unease with the label "right-wing" and the tendency to attempt to place his work on a crude political spectrum dealing with various subjects, especially politics, philosophy, culture, society, media, criticism and art.
"Only the subject's individual consciousness can testify for the unwitnessed acts, and there is no act more deprived of external testimony than the act of knowing." (Olavo de Carvalho)
Philosophy
His series of lectures História Essential da Filosofia (Essential History of Philosophy) is available on DVD. In that work, he considers philosophy an enduring intellectual project established by Socrates and analyzes the subsequent developments up to the present as continuation, deviation or opposition to the original project. He also proposes a definition of what is philosophy, based on what Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were trying to accomplish: "it is the unity of knowledge in the unity of conscience, and vice-versa". Post-medieval philosophy, in his opinion, has departed from more than continued this enterprise. He sustains, however, that up to the 1st half of the 20th Century, there were still authentic philosophers, such as Eric Voegelin, Xavier Zubiri and José Ortega y Gasset. He often points Leibniz as the greatest philosophical mind since Aristotle.
Though a prolific writer, most of his philosophical work is in oral form, and is available either in recordings or transcriptions of his lectures. Significant class material is available at his website, but de Carvalho has stated that only a fraction of his classes have been written down. The class recordings, including material from the 90s, are continuously being transcribed by his students and uploaded to his philosophy seminary homepage. [3]
He has strongly opposed some of the most renowned philosophers of the modern period, notably Immanuel Kant, whose theories regarding the impossibility of knowing the thing in itself Carvalho considers artificial, since the precise limits to human understanding are themselves only knowable by someone who hypothetically has gone beyond them. Such limits, therefore, are contingent, not necessary as Kant would want. [4]
The main theme in Carvalho's essays and articles is the defense of human interiority against the tyranny of collective authority; or, in his own words: Only the subject's individual consciousness can testify for the unwitnessed acts, and there is no act more deprived of external testimony than the act of knowing.
Notes
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