Mário Ferreira dos Santos

Mário Dias Ferreira dos Santos (1907–1968)

Brazilian philosopher, translator and journalist, self-taught and deliberately outside the university, who built a system he called 'concrete philosophy' and published it through the 1950s and 1960s as the Enciclopédia de Ciências Filosóficas e Sociais. How many volumes it finally ran to is disputed: 45, 48 and 'more than 50' are all in print, each with a different source and a different way of counting. He translated from German, French and English, passed through São Paulo's anarchist milieu in the mid-1940s, and held no teaching post — 'Nunca ocupei nenhum cargo em nenhuma escola, por princípio', he said of himself in 1976. He fell into obscurity after his death in 1968 and has been republished since the late 1990s by several houses, most visibly É Realizações, whose programme of reissues was run by Olavo de Carvalho until it was reassigned in or before 2018.[6] [4] [10] [11] [12] [8] [7] [9] [13] [19]

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Life and works

YearEvent
3 January 1907Born Mário Dias Ferreira dos Santos in Tietê, in the state of São Paulo, son of Francisco Dias Ferreira dos Santos — a Portuguese from the Porto region who ran the itinerant theatre company Guarany-Brazil and is described as a pioneer of Brazilian cinema. The date descends from Carlo Beraldo's 1969 Enciclopedia Filosofica entry, which reaches this page only as quoted in Brazilian secondary literature; the corresponding Wikidata claim carries no reference at all. Tietê is near-universal, though the Faculdade Dehoniana's 2023 course notice gives 'São Paulo, SP' — an imprecision on an institutional site rather than a rival claim.[10] [6] [15] [18]
c. 1911 ≈The family moves to Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, where the father sets up a printing works, a cinema circuit, the Teatro Guarany and the Guarany Films production company; childhood and adolescence are spent there. The account is the UFPB dissertation's, which states in its own note that its entire biographical section comes from the unpublished family monograph written by his daughter and his wife.[6] [12]
1913Appears as a child in Os Óculos do Vovô, a short directed by his father and held by the Cinemateca Brasileira among the oldest surviving Brazilian films. The filmography record cited for it (ID 001395) reaches this page through a pt.wikipedia footnote and has not been checked against the Cinemateca directly, so the appearance is recorded as unverified.[16] [19]
1916–1924Educated at the Jesuit Gymnasio, later Colégio Gonzaga, in Pelotas, until the age of eighteen. His atheist and anticlerical father enrolled him there for the quality of the teaching — the origin story he himself gave for his first contact with what he later called 'Filosofia Positiva'. Beraldo's entry confirms the school; the anecdote is the family monograph's.[6] [10] [12]
1925–1930Reads Law and Social Sciences at the Faculdade de Direito de Porto Alegre, graduating in 1930. His first press article, 'O poeta da luz e da cor', appears in the Diário Popular of Pelotas on 20 July 1928 — the start of a career that runs to some 177 articles in the papers of Pelotas, Porto Alegre and São Paulo. The UFPB dissertation dates the beginning of the press work to 1928; the exact date, the title and the article count come from pt.wikipedia sourced to the family monograph. He supports the Revolution of 1930 as a journalist and then turns on acts of the new government.[6] [10] [19] [12]
1929Becomes director of the Rio Grande do Sul newspaper A Opinião Pública, and marries; two daughters follow, Yolanda and Nadiejda. The chain here is family testimony and is not independently corroborated. The sources also carry a name collision they do not resolve — Yolanda Duro Lhullier is given both as his mother and as his wife — and it is recorded here rather than smoothed away.[19] [12] [6]
December 1930Arrested, reportedly for encouraging worker strikes, and released through the intervention of General Flores da Cunha and the Pelotas mayor Py Crespo, losing the newspaper directorship. He published his own account, 'PORQUE FUI DETIDO', in A Opinião Pública of 19 December 1930 — a datable primary document, located through a pt.wikipedia footnote and not seen here.[19]
1931–1938A documented gap. No source consulted for this page accounts for these eight years, and pt.wikipedia says as much explicitly. Recorded as unknown rather than filled in from the surrounding narrative.[19]
c. 1939–1941 ≈Resumes press work — Clímax in Pelotas, Movimento and the Diário de Notícias in Porto Alegre. After his father's death the family firm, Empresa Xavier & Santos, the largest cinema chain in southern Brazil and by then under his direction, goes bankrupt in 1941.[6] [19] [12]
c. 1943 ≈Contracted by the Livraria do Globo in Porto Alegre to translate Nietzsche, Pascal, Amiel and Balzac, all from the originals. Globo then refuses a philosophical essay of his own, on the advice of a reader who held that Brazilians would not read philosophy — the stated trigger for his departure, and an account that comes from the family monograph. The years of the individual Nietzsche translations are the weakest point in this chronology: the UFPel dissertation that would fix them returns 403 from this session and has no Wayback snapshot.[6] [12]
1944 or 1945Moves to São Paulo. The year is not settled and both are recorded: pt.wikipedia gives 1945, a UFPel-adjacent account has him arriving around 1944 carrying his translation of the Vontade de Potência from the Globo period, and the UFPB dissertation gives no year at all. In São Paulo he translates for Editora Flama (Whitman, Benjamin Constant, Goethe), then directs the editorial section of Editora e Distribuidora Sagitário, publishing work of his own under pseudonyms, and later works in the rare-books section of the Livraria Ritz.[6] [19]
1945–1947Anarchist militancy in São Paulo: active at the Centro de Cultura Social, one of the city's principal anarchist nuclei, where he lectures and meets Jaime Cubero in 1945. At Sagitário he translates Rudolf Rocker — the one documented translation of the anarchist period. Two texts circulate in libertarian periodicals: Teses da Existência e da Inexistência de Deus, under the name Charles Duclos (Sagitário, 1946), and Análise Dialética do Marxismo. He is read and cited by Edgard Leuenroth and by Cubero, and is one of the few Brazilian students of Christian anarchism. No evidence was found that he ever translated Stirner: the specialist survey of Portuguese Stirner translations does not mention him, and the documented Portuguese versions of Der Einzige are by other hands.[8] [19]
1947–1953Logos is three things, and no source consulted reconciles them. pt.wikipedia has an Instituto Cultural Logos founded in 1947, a teaching institute giving in-person and correspondence courses in Portuguese, history, geography, the sciences, mathematics, psychology, philosophy, logic, dialectic and 'cosmovisão'. The UFPB dissertation has the Livraria e Editora Logos Ltda., the publishing house, founded in 1953, whose first titles are write-ups of oratory courses heavily attended by politicians and lawyers — Curso de Oratória e Retórica, Práticas de Oratória, Técnica do Discurso Moderno. pt.wikipedia also refers to a 'Logos S.A.' founded after 1952. These are plausibly three stages of one venture; they are recorded as three because nothing consulted joins them. From 1947 he says he gave himself entirely to philosophy, teaching private pupils and small informal groups.[19] [6]
c. 1950 ≈Compiles the cheap-format collection 'Cultura para Milhões' for Editora Edigraf — newsprint, no illustrations, deliberately low-cost, to widen access.[6]
1952–1956Filosofia e Cosmovisão, later designated volume 1 of the Enciclopédia de Ciências Filosóficas e Sociais, opens the project, and the systematic introductions follow across the branches: Lógica e Dialética (1953), Psicologia (1953), Teoria do Conhecimento (1954), Ontologia e Cosmologia (1954), Tratado de Simbólica (1956), Filosofia da Crise (1956), O Homem Perante o Infinito (1956) and Noologia Geral (1956). These years are the FAJE monograph's, and this is the messiest area in the record. For the first volume alone: 1952 under the Edanee imprint in the FAJE narrative and pt.wikipedia's prose; 1954 under Logos in pt.wikipedia's own bibliography, which contradicts its prose; 1955 under Logos on the scanned copy circulating online. Reprints issued without new-edition statements, and the retroactive renumbering of earlier books into the encyclopedia sequence, are the likely causes; the rule applied here is to cite the imprint one can actually see and say which copy it is.[4] [19]
c. 1953–1955 ≈The first twelve volumes appear. Distributors decline to carry them for want of demand, so he pioneers door-to-door book sales on credit — venda a crediário — in Brazil, successfully enough that he has to take premises able to receive sales representatives arriving from across the country. The anecdote comes through the family monograph.[6] [12]
1957Filosofia Concreta, the tenth work of the series and the one at which, in the standard academic reading, he passes from commentator and essayist to philosopher. The date is the FAJE monograph's; pt.wikipedia's work-list gives 1956 and the scanned Logos tomes I–III give 1961.[4] [19]
1952–1968How large the Enciclopédia de Ciências Filosóficas e Sociais finally was is disputed, and the figures are not noise: they turn on whether multi-tome works are counted once or severally, and on whether the Matese-imprint books count as encyclopedia volumes at all. Beraldo's 1969 entry gives 45 volumes 'in less than fifteen years', and is the origin of the figure most often repeated without attribution; Carlos Eduardo de Carvalho Vargas (Revista Nures, PUC-SP, 2007) gives 48, the last of them titled Deus; Miriam Dornas Gomes Pereira (FAJE, 2019) gives 'more than 50'; and catalogue copy circulates a fourth figure, '45 planned', which is a different claim again. The range is reported with each figure's source; none of them is chosen here.[10] [7] [4]
1963–1968Founds Editora Matese, which issues classics, the Matese series and the long-planned Dicionário de Filosofia e Ciências Culturais in four volumes (1963). The late books follow: A Invasão Vertical dos Bárbaros and A Sabedoria dos Princípios, which opens the Matese series, both 1967, with A Sabedoria da Unidade also in 1967 and A Sabedoria do Ser e do Nada in 1968.[6] [4] [19]
11 April 1968Dies, with very nearly the whole encyclopedia published in his lifetime. The date is solid — consistent across every source and present in Beraldo's 1969 entry. The particulars are not. That he died in São Paulo, of cardiovascular disease, and was buried in the Cemitério do Araçá rests on three Wikidata claims (P570, P20, P119), each of which carries zero references when the entity JSON is checked, and on a Find a Grave memorial that returns 403 to every client tried here. Place, cause and burial are therefore recorded as unverified.[10] [15]
1976Stanislavs Ladusãns publishes Rumos da filosofia atual no Brasil: em auto-retratos, whose pages 407–409 carry Ferreira dos Santos's own self-portrait and the much-quoted line 'Nunca ocupei nenhum cargo em nenhuma escola, por princípio' — I have never held any post in any school, on principle. Ladusãns places him among the leading Brazilian philosophers of the first half of the century, beside Flusser, Cruz Costa and Lima Vaz. The book is print-only and could not be obtained here, so the quotation is carried at second hand. The claim, widely circulated, that he taught philosophy of science at the USP Escola Politécnica and philosophy of communication at the Escola Superior de Cinema and the Escola de Arte Dramática in the 1960s is deliberately absent from this timeline: every occurrence traced runs back to movement and fan sites rather than to a USP institutional record, and this sentence of his own contradicts it.[11] [14] [19]
1988 onward ≈Academic reception, thin and late. Wadson Machado Neto's 1988 UFJF master's thesis is repeatedly named as the first academic study; later work includes Vargas (PUC-SP, 2007), Roger Moura dos Santos (UFPB, 2016), Elvis Amsterdã (UFSC, 2019), Pereira (FAJE, 2019) and Braga (Ítaca/UFRJ, 2024). João Cezar de Castro Rocha, in his preface to the 2017 Filosofia da Crise, attributes the long neglect partly to the 1950s turn toward university-based philosophical research, against which Ferreira dos Santos's autodidactism read as illegitimate — his explanation, offered in a book of the revival, and recorded as such.[6] [7] [17] [9]
1998–2003Scattered posthumous republication, and not by one house: O Apocalipse de São João (Editorial Cone Sul, 1998), O Um e o Múltiplo em Platão and Pitágoras e o Tema do Número reissued by IBRASA (2000 and 2001), and Cristianismo, a Religião do Homem by the university press EDUSC (2003). In 2001 É Realizações published A Sabedoria das Leis Eternas, the earliest of its Ferreira dos Santos titles that can be dated here, 'com introdução, edição e notas de Olavo de Carvalho'. É Realizações had been founded in 2000 out of a cultural space Edson Manoel de Oliveira Filho had run since 1995, which hosted Olavo de Carvalho's courses from 1996–97.[19] [13]
2007–2019The systematic É Realizações reissues: Tratado de Simbólica (2007), Filosofia Concreta (2009), A Invasão Vertical dos Bárbaros (2012), Filosofia e Cosmovisão (2015, reprinted 2018), Filosofia da Crise (2017, with prefaces by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and João Cezar de Castro Rocha) and Homens da Tarde (2019); Lógica e Dialética came from PAULUS in 2007. These years are taken from third-party bibliographic and retail records: the publisher's own site refuses connections from this session, so its catalogue could not be checked. The reissues were accompanied by a layer of sympathetic profiles in the Brazilian press and in cultural blogs, which repeat the encyclopedia figure and the biography without attribution; they are cited here as evidence of the rediscovery discourse and not as sources for anything in it.[17] [19] [5] [3]
8 May 2018The revival's authorship is itself contested, and is attributed here rather than asserted. Francisco Escorsim reports in Gazeta do Povo that the É Realizações programme of Ferreira dos Santos republication, until then managed by Olavo de Carvalho, had been reassigned, producing 'significant changes in editorial treatment' and few new titles since. It is the one independent press account of the revival's internal history, and it is why no version of 'É Realizações rescued Mário Ferreira dos Santos' is stated on this page: that is a claim with a history behind it.[13]
2023Elvis Amsterdã's Vida e Obra de Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Uma Introdução (Curitiba: Editora Danúbio, 100 pp.) — the first book-length biographical study, with a biographical chronology, photographs and unpublished documents in an appendix, reviewed in the Revista Filosófica de Coimbra the following year. It is known to this page only through that review, and it is the book to read before any of the disagreements recorded above is closed.[9]

Reception in the COF

Present in 141 of the 589 transcription files of the Curso Online de Filosofia; 20 lectures engage him substantially (5 or more mentions). The most engaged lectures:

This section documents what Olavo said and when — never what the philosopher "really" meant. Characterizations are Olavo’s, tied to a lecture by number and date.

Lecture (aula)DateMentions
732010-09-0413
712010-08-2112
1002011-04-0212
409—12
112009-06-2011
142009-07-119
752010-09-189
1412012-02-118
322—8
422010-01-237
2792015-01-177
322009-11-146
332009-11-216
412010-01-166
482010-03-066

A dash in the date column means the transcription file carries no verified date — an undated file, not an undated lecture. Counts are accent-insensitive, word-boundary matches over the public community transcription corpus.[1] [2]

References

  1. COF — community transcriptions of the Curso Online de Filosofia (585 lectures) — Community transcription repository (upstream declares CC0 for the transcription work; the lectures remain the estate's)
  2. COF em Áudio — lecture audio collection — Internet Archive (community upload)
  3. Os Brasileiros: Mário Ferreira dos Santos — Jornal da Besta Fubana (Brazilian cultural blog — biographical profile, sympathetic perspective)
  4. O ponto arquimédico da Filosofia Concreta segundo a concepção de Mário Ferreira dos Santos (Miriam Dornas Gomes Pereira, monografia, 2019) — FAJE — Faculdade Jesuíta de Filosofia e Teologia (academic monograph)
  5. Redescobrindo o filósofo brasileiro Mário Ferreira dos Santos (Eduardo Luiz Santos Cabette, 2014) — Migalhas (Brazilian legal portal — opinion article, sympathetic perspective)
  6. Roger Moura dos Santos, A via simbólica na fundamentação da Matese de Mário Ferreira dos Santos (dissertação de mestrado, UFPB, 2016) — Programa de Pós-Graduação em Filosofia, Universidade Federal da Paraíba
  7. Carlos Eduardo de Carvalho Vargas, 'Contribuições filosóficas de Mário Ferreira dos Santos à metodologia da pesquisa sobre religião', Revista Nures n. 5 (2007) — Núcleo de Estudos Religião e Sociedade, PUC-SP
  8. Gustavo Ramus, 'Anarquismo cristão e sua influência no Brasil', verve n. 13 (2008) — verve — revista semestral autogestionária do Nu-Sol, PUC-SP
  9. Recensão: Elvis Amsterdã, Vida e Obra de Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Uma Introdução (Danúbio, 2023), Revista Filosófica de Coimbra n. 66 (2024), pp. 479–485 — Revista Filosófica de Coimbra (Universidade de Coimbra)
  10. Carlo Beraldo, entry on Mário Ferreira dos Santos, in Enciclopedia Filosofica (Centro di Studi Filosofici di Gallarate), Firenze: Sansoni, 1969, p. 231 — Centro di Studi Filosofici di Gallarate / G. C. Sansoni Editore (Open Library record for the edition)
  11. Stanislavs Ladusãns, Rumos da filosofia atual no Brasil: em auto-retratos (1976), pp. 407–409 — Open Library record for the edition
  12. Nadiejda Galvão and Yolanda Santos, Monografia sobre Mário Ferreira dos Santos (unpublished, 2001) — Unpublished family monograph; its existence and role documented at note 1, p. 12 of the UFPB dissertation (linked)
  13. Francisco Escorsim, 'As editoras em tempos de guerra cultural – II', Gazeta do Povo, 8 May 2018 — Gazeta do Povo (Brazilian daily — opinion column)
  14. Eduardo Bonzatto, 'Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Vilém Flusser e Olavo de Carvalho: o peso dos intelectuais fora da universidade', Pragmatismo Político, 14 February 2024 — Pragmatismo Político (Brazilian opinion site — left-of-center)
  15. Mário Ferreira dos Santos (Q672004) — Wikidata
  16. Os Óculos do Vovô (1913) — Cinemateca Brasileira filmography record 001395 — Cinemateca Brasileira (filmography database)
  17. Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Filosofia da Crise (São Paulo: É Realizações, 2017), prefaces by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, pp. 1–17 — É Realizações (Open Library record for the edition)
  18. Geysel Rodrigues, 'Mario Ferreira dos Santos: o curso sobre um filósofo brasileiro', Faculdade Dehoniana, 7 July 2023 — Faculdade Dehoniana (Catholic higher-education institution, Taubaté)
  19. Mário Ferreira dos Santos — Portuguese Wikipedia