Title Details

“Is there a Brazilian philosophy?” Ivan Domingues asks. To cast light on this question in 'Philosophy in Brazil: Legacies and Perspectives', Domingues employs an essay as a literary device. The result is an extensive philosophical reflection upon philosophy itself, a meta-philosophical text whose “object happens to be the Brazilian philosophy, or more precisely, the philosophical problem of the existence (or non-existence) of a philosophy in Brazil that justifies the adjective ‘Brazilian’.”

He arranges his reflections into six chapters, “deployed as a sequence of argumentative steps with a controlled thematic unity.” The first step is dedicated to the delineation of the meta-philosophical argument for the possibility of any national philosophy with temporal boundaries, in which the purpose of the essay is discussed and the methodology is justified.” Domingues is closely attentive to the course of history of ideas in Brazil, from the Colonial Period to present, and the analytic undertake consists of intersecting the intellectual history and meta-philosophical investigation. In this complex setting, he debates the very nature of philosophical reason and the actual experience of thinking philosophically. He insists these are variable, demanding, always a careful contextual reconstruction,which will occupy the five subsequent chapters, from refining the focus of the problem to the examination of diverse possible perspectives on the topic.