Álvaro Ribeiro

Álvaro Carvalho de Sousa Ribeiro (1 March 1905 – 9 October 1981) was a Portuguese philosopher, writer and critic.

Until the end of his life, he published a vast body of work as a prose writer, educator, hermeneut and memoirist, in which he intended, on the one hand, to update an Aristotelian rationalism that was very attentive to the problems of verbal language, in which he saw the genuine matrix of Portuguese thought, from Pedro Hispano or Álvaro Pais (14th century), and, on the other hand, to magisterialize the esoteric tradition of knowledge, especially Judaic-Cabbalist, in which he inserted the modern renovation of Portuguese thought, begun for him with Sampaio Bruno.

The Portuguese poet who most vividly challenged Álvaro Ribeiro, the thinker of enigmas, was Fernando Pessoa. He compiled from him in a volume the texts published in the magazine A Águia in 1912, dedicated to nostalgic poetry; the collection, The New Portuguese Poetry (1944), was the first compilation of the poet's dispersed works and preceded many other initiatives of its kind, the first of which was Jorge de Sena's collection, Pages of Aesthetic Doctrine (1945), which counted on Álvaro's large and generous collaboration.

Biography

Álvaro de Carvalho de Sousa Ribeiro, the only son of José de Sousa Oliveira Guimarães Daun e Lorena Ribeiro and Angélica Cândida de Carvalho de Sousa Ribeiro, was born in Miragaia, Porto. Between 1917 and 1919, he was a boarding student at a Dominican college in Paris, only later joining the General High School Course at the Lyceum Rodrigues de Freitas. He graduated in Historical-Philosophical Sciences from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Porto, where he was a disciple of Leonardo Coimbra and a fellow student of Adolfo Casais Monteiro and Delfim Santos.

He was one of those who signed in Lisbon, in 1932, the letter of presentation of the Democratic Renewal Movement.

He founded the Portuguese Philosophy movement in Lisbon with the publication, in 1943, of the manifesto The Problem of Portuguese Philosophy, a group that was soon joined by his friend José Marinho and also Sant'Anna Dionísio, António Alvim, Miguel Summavielle, Eudoro de Sousa, among others. That manifesto was edited by Eduardo Salgueiro, who had been his colleague years before in the Democratic Renewal movement.

In Lisbon, he kept a lively tertulia around his teaching for decades, renewing his movement through successive generations, including Afonso Botelho, António Braz Teixeira, António Quadros, António Telmo, Pinharanda Gomes, Orlando Vitorino, Cunha Leão, Francisco Moraes Sarmento, among other thinkers. He directed the magazine Princípio (1930) and collaborated in Diário Popular, Ação Republicana, Atlântico, Democracia, the newspaper 57 (1957–1962), Escola Formal and Ensaio. He was one of the founding members of the Portuguese Language Society.

One of his most faithful disciples, António Quadros, would later write: "Marinho was the contemplator of the number, of the hidden spirit, in the anagogic experience of the univocal vision. But Álvaro Ribeiro was the worker of God, the worker that, bent over the great machine of the world and over the anthill of men, tried to make them move, rolling each one of us to a proper function and taking us the instructions left by the original manufacturer. To each Portuguese thinker, his poet. If Junqueiro to Bruno, Antero to Sérgio, Pascoaes to Leonardo and Marinho, Pessoa to Agostinho, Álvaro Ribeiro's poet was José Régio."

Álvaro Ribeiro died in Lisbon at 76 years of age. He was buried in the Benfica Cemetery.

Works

Major publications

• O problema da filosofia portuguesa (1943)
• Leonardo Coimbra: apontamentos de biografia e de bibliografia (1945)
• Sampaio Bruno (1947)
• Os Positivistas: subsídios para a história da filosofia em Portugal (1951)
• Apologia e Filosofia (1953)
• A Arte de Filosofar (1955)
• A Razão Animada: sumário de Antropologia (1957)
• Escola Formal (1958)
• Estudos Gerais (1961)
• Liceu Aristotélico (1962)
• Escritores Doutrinados (1965)
• A Literatura de José Régio (1969)
• Filosofia e Filologia (1972)
• Uma coisa que pensa: ensaios (1975)
• Memórias de um Letrado (1977; 3 volumes)
• Cartas para Delfim Santos, 1931-1956 (2001)
• Correspondência com José Régio (2008)

Translations

• Kant, by Émile Boutroux (1943)
• Do Hábito, by Félix Ravaisson-Mollien (1945)
• Elogio da Loucura, by Erasmus (1951)
• Ensaios, by Francis Bacon (1952)
• A Cidade do Sol, by Tommaso Campanella (1953)
• O Banquete, by Søren Kierkegaard (1953)
• A Origem da Tragédia, by Friedrich Nietzsche (1954)
• A Verdade do Amor, by Vladimir Solovyov (Lisboa, 1958)
• Os Heróis, by Thomas Carlyle (1956)
• Estética, Arquitectura e Escultura, by Hegel (1962)
• Estética, Pintura e Música, by Hegel (1974)
• Reorganizar a sociedade, by Auguste Comte (1977)
• Lucinda, by Friedrich Schlegel (1979)

References

• AAVV. (2005). O Pensamento e a Obra de José Marinho e de Álvaro Ribeiro. Lisboa: INCM.
• Régio, José (2008). Correspondência com Álvaro Ribeiro. Lisboa: INCM.
• Teixeira, António Braz (1992). "Ribeiro (Álvaro Carvalho de Souza)." In: Logos - enciclopédia Luso-Brasileira de Filosofia, Vol. 4. Lisboa/São Paulo: Editorial Verbo, pp. 758–68.
• Teixeira, António Braz (2000). "Álvaro Ribeiro." In: Pedro Calafate, ed., História do pensamento filosófico português, Vol. 4, Tome 1. Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, pp. 179–209.

External links

• Álvaro de Carvalho de Sousa Ribeiro