Methodology in the historiography of brazilian philosophy

Abstract

The article examines the methodological problem of how to write the history of Brazilian philosophy, focusing on the tension between historicist and structuralist approaches and their effects on the interpretation of nineteenth-century Brazilian thought. Its objective is to reassess the main historiographical models — especially Cruz Costa’s historicism and Bento Prado Jr.’s structuralist reading — and to propose an alternative method capable of doing justice both to the textual rationality of the doctrines and to their concrete historical insertion. The central problem is twofold: on the one hand, the widespread negationist thesis that denies the existence of a genuine system of philosophical works in nineteenth-century Brazil; on the other, the reduction of historiography either to the evolution of a supposed national “soul” (psychologistic and historicist bias) or to a series of discontinuous epistemological cuts detached from their causal and social conditions. The article is structured in three main movements: (1) reconstruction of Bento Prado Jr.’s theses on the inexistence of a philosophical system in nineteenth-century Brazil and on the limits of historicism and psychologism; (2) critical evaluation of these theses, showing that, when Antônio Cândido’s criteria of “system of works” are applied to nineteenth-century Brazilian philosophy, it is possible to identify authors, works, public and thematic networks that constitute a genuine philosophical system; (3) presentation of an alternative method based on the complementarity between text and context and on the notion of “historical drift”, which articulates continuity and discontinuity without appealing either to a metaphysical national spirit or to an ahistorical structuralism. The main result is a positive requalification of nineteenth-century Brazilian philosophy and the formulation of a more balanced historiographical framework, capable of integrating reasons and causes, doctrines and social conditions, in the study of Brazilian philosophical traditions.