Description

FCT Project POCI/FIL/60850/2004

When the Ministries of Portugal and Brazil are preparing the commemorations of the 100th anniversary of Agostinho da Silva in 2006, this project, organized in different levels, seeks after the objective and non-engaged knowledge of the sense of a work which, being till now still dependent on the public image of its author, has raised a general interest and is likewise object of several theses.

First, it is aimed to continue the systematic research, gathering, organization, study and publication of the author’s literary assets: the one which already exists in Agostinho da Silva’s Association, as well as the other which is scattered along Portugal and Brazil. It is aimed to identify and organize the already gathered documents, in particular the great amount of not yet published ones – among which there is a great number of autobiographical texts, aphorisms, philosophical reflections, poetry, translations, in handwritten form, as well as the PIDE/DGS process – and then publish tem, following the first phase of his work’s edition.

Secondly, the project aims the hermeneutics of the philosophical thought explicit or implicit in Agostinho da Silva’s texts, putting a particular stress on his major subjects – metaphysics and ontology, philosophy of the religion, anthropology and ethics, philosophy of education, philosophy of the history and of the culture, social and political philosophy – as well as on his original dialogue with themes and questions which are fundamental to the philosophical and religious eastern and western traditions, namely the idea and the experience of God, the being and the nothing, the human nature and the ultimate sense of his existence, the ethical sense of the action and of the education, as the total fulfilment of all human possibilities in the concrete mediations of history, society and culture.

Thirdly, it is aimed to place Agostinho da Silva’s philosophical thought in the context of the contemporary philosophy, and the ones in Portugal and Brazil. Here, it can be stated the original synthesis of tendencies, that operate between a Christian spirituality of Neo-Platonist matrix, in a dialogue with the Taoist and Buddhist East and the search for an educational, social, historical and civilization reform, which flow into one of the least and most significant expressions, during the 20th century, of a messianic, encouraging and utopian western tradition, following the steps of Joaquim de Flora and remembering, with the natural differences, the multiform heterodoxy of an Ernst Bloch. On the other hand, in the sphere of the Portuguese-Brazilian thought, it is aimed to examine thoroughly the sense of the reinterpretation of some of Luís de Camões’, Padre António Vieira’s and Ferando Pessoa’s themes, as well as the relationships, in Portugal, with Teixeira Rego, Leonardo Coimbra, António Sérgio, and with Jaime Cortesão, Cicente Ferreira da Silva, Eudoro de Sousa, among others, in Brazil. Agostinho da Silva appears, in this range, as the last thinker of the historical and cultural sense of Portugal, of Brazil and of the Portuguese-speaking communities, by the light of a global vision of the last sense of the world’s history and of human existence.

Research Team

Paulo Borges, Amon Pinho, Renato Epifânio, Romana Pinho, Rui Miranda, Ricardo Ventura.

Publications

Events