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From Mr. De Carvalho's
website: Olavo de Carvalho was
born in Campinas in the state of São Paulo, on April 29th, 1947. He
has been honored by the critics as one of the most original and daring
Brazilian thinkers. Men with as different intellectual orientations as
Jorge Amado, Arnaldo Jabor, Ciro Gomes, Roberto Campos, J.O. de Meira
Penna, Bruno Tolentino, Herberto Sales, Josué Montello and
ex-president of the Republic José Sarney have all already expressed
their admiration for him and his work.
The keynote of his work is the defence of human interiority against
the tyranny of collective authority, above all when this tyranny
relies on a “scientific” ideology. To Olavo de Carvalho there is an
unbreakable link between the objectivity of knowledge and the autonomy
of individual conscience. This link is lost from sight when the
criteria of validity of knowledge is reduced to an impersonal and
uniform form only for the use of the academic class.
Believing that the most solid abode of the
individual conscience against alienation and enthingation is found in
the old spiritual traditions – Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islamism
- Olavo de Carvalho attempts to give a new interpretation to the
symbols and rites of these traditions, making out of them the matrixes
of a new philosophical and scientific strategy for the resolution of
the problems of modern culture.
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