Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho (born April 29, 1947, in the city of Campinas, in the state of São Paulo) is an essayist and journalist. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, U.S.
Early life
Little is known about Olavo de Carvalho's life before 1996. According the information de Carvalho has made available in his official website, he began working as a journalist before he turned 18. De Carvalho claims that, during the Brazilian military dictatorship, he was a member of then outlawed Brazilian Communist Party, and protected fellow militants from the regime. He supposedly left the Party in 1968, and later, he gradually distanced himself both from the leftist world view and from politics in general. His right-wing views are now explicit. He also claims to have studied Philosophy for three years at PUC-Rio, a famous Catholic University in Brazil, under the supervision of Priest Stanislavs Ladusans, but, soon after his tutor's death, quit his studies. In the meantime, he began teaching philosophy to small classes. He himself wrote part of the readings of his courses.
Career as a writer
His first book was an essay on astrology, the title of which was A imagem do homem na astrologia (The Image of mankind in astrology). He began writing and speaking to the general public under the influence of his friend, the poet Bruno Tolentino. His first essay on political thinking is A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural (1993) (The New Era and the Cultural Revolution), which aimed to be a study on the flaws of the theories of Fritjof Capra and Antonio Gramsci, and strongly criticized of the influence those thinkers had on the Brazilian intelligentsia.
His notoriety increased greatly when he published O Imbecil Coletivo: Atualidades Inculturais Brasileiras (The Collective Imbecile: Brazilian Uncultural News), in 1996, a collection of essays meant to display the mediocrity of Brazilian intellectuals, which prompted many new admirers and haters.
In his subsequent book, O Jardim das Aflições (The Garden of Afflictions), de Carvalho argues that there is a deep but so far unnoticed influence of Epicurus in Marx's thinking , and shows how the advent of the modern thinking is creating a civil religion at the expense of the sacred traditions, especially Christianity.
In Aristóteles em Nova Perspectiva (Aristotle from a New Perspective), de Carvalho advances an original interpretation of the thought of Aristotle, called the "Four Speeches Theory".
There are also two collection of essays that come from classes, conferences and previously unpublished articles: O Futuro do Pensamento Brasileiro (The Future of Brazilian Thinking) and A Dialética Simbólica (The Symbolic Dialectics). The last one comprises essays written over a two-decade span.
Olavo de Carvalho is also the creator of Mídia Sem Máscara (Media Unmasked), a media-watch online journal in which he tries to address errors and omissions from what is usually seen by him and his contributors as a very strong leftist bias in the press.
The success led him to write in many Brazilian leading newspapers, such as O Globo, Jornal do Brasil and Folha de São Paulo, but his constant polemics made him to be fired. He came to live in the USA, establishing himself and his family in Virginia, where he works as an international correspondent for the São Paulo newspaper Diário do Comércio.
Views
His series of lectures (Essential History of Philosophy) is available on DVD. In that work, he considers philosophy an enduring intellectual project established by Socrates and analyzes the subsequent developments up to the present as continuation, deviation or opposition to the original project. He also proposes a definition of what is philosophy, based on what Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were trying to accomplish: "it is the unity of knowledge in the unity of conscience, and vice-versa". Post-medieval philosophy, in his opinion, has departed from more than continued this enterprise. He sustains, however, that up to the 1st half of the 20th Century, there were still authentic philosophers, such as Eric Voegelin, Louis Lavelle, Bernard Lonergan, Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Xavier Zubiri, and José Ortega y Gasset. He often points Leibniz as the greatest philosophical mind since Aristotle.
Though de Carvalho has written some books, to which he himself ascribes great importance, most of his works are papers published in newspapers and magazines, which can be found in his website. Another part of his work is in oral form, available either through recordings or transcriptions of his lectures. De Carvalho has stated that only a fraction of his classes have been written down. The class recordings, including material from the 90s, are continuously being transcribed by his students and uploaded to his philosophy seminary homepage.
He has strongly opposed some of the most renowned philosophers of the modern period, notably Immanuel Kant, whose theories regarding the impossibility of knowing the thing in itself Carvalho considers artificial, since the precise limits to human understanding are themselves only knowable by someone who hypothetically has gone beyond them. Such limits, therefore, are contingent, not necessary as Kant would want.
The main theme in de Carvalho's essays and articles is the defense of human interiority against the tyranny of collective authority; or, in his own words: Only the subject's individual consciousness can testify for the unwitnessed acts, and there is no act more deprived of external testimony than the act of knowing.
Anecdotes
One of the controversial features of de Carvalho's work is the apparently unintentional comicality of his articles in newspapers and magazines. Several excerpts have been quoted by his readers as anecdotes. Here are some of his most famous and controversial maxims, all of which are sentences actually written by him, with the original words in Portuguese and reference to the pertinent article and the internet link:
On Cuban Troops in Angola
How to explain tens of thousands of Angolans killed by occupation forces under Che Guevara's command sent overseas, fully armed with bacteriological weapons? (Como explicar, ... algumas dezenas de milhares de angolanos mortos pelas tropas de ocupação enviadas ao ultramar sob o comando de Che Guevara, com farto estoque de armas bacteriológicas?) In .
Note: Che Guevara died in 1967. Cuban forces were sent to Angola in order help the MPLA in November, 1975, i.e., eight years after Guevara's death.
On Bill Clinton
In his youth, Bill Clinton was among thousands of leftist students who benefited from KGB subsidies... (Na juventude, Bill Clinton foi um dos milhares de estudantes esquerdistas que se beneficiaram das verbas da KGB...) in Clinton, a guerra e a China.
On Isaac Newton
Newton has spread not only atheism through western cultures, but also the virus of a terrific stupidity. (Newton não espalhou só o ateísmo pela cultura ocidental: espalhou o vírus de uma burrice formidável.) In Nas origens da burrice ocidental.
On George Soros and the Farc
The greatest financial backer of the drugs liberation front is George Soros, who also subsidizes pro-terrorist and disarmamentist groups... He has already bought lands in Bolivia, where, if all legal obstacles are removed, he will have the means to become the largest provider of raw material for the Farc. (O maior financiador da campanha pela liberação das drogas é George Soros, que também subsidia organizações pró-terroristas e desarmamentistas... Já comprou terras na Bolívia, onde, uma vez retirados os entraves legais, terá tudo para ser o maior fornecedor de matéria-prima para as Farc.) In .
Revolutionary Mind
One of Olavo de Carvalho’s subject of investigations is what he calls the Revolutionary Mind. According to him, the revolutionary mind is the “state of spirit, permanent or transient, by which an individual or a group believes himself to be able to remold the society - or else the human nature in general - by the mean of political action”.
De Carvalho states that the revolutionary mind is "a historic phenomenon perfectly identifiable and continuous, whose development throughout five centuries can be traced in uncountable documents”.
The Inter-American Institute
In 2010, de Carvalho founded the Inter-American Institute with the aim of stimulating, among American and Hispanic intellectuals, discussion and serious study of the topics he has been working on for many year (e.g. studies on "cognitive parallax", "the four discourses", "triple intuition," etc...)
There are conservative intellectuals and politicians that are fellows of the institute and public content in its website. Some of them are Dr. Ted Baehr, Alejandro Peña Esclusa, Dr. Edwin Vieira, Dr. Judith Reisman, Dr. Ahmed Youssif El Tassa, Dr. Earle Fox, John Haskins and Miguel Bruno Duarte.

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