Euryalo Cannabrava

Background

Cannabrava, Euryalo was born in 1908.

Career

Professor, Colegio Pedro II, Rio de Janeiro. A well-respected thinker in Brazil.

Views

Alter an early phase in which he was sympathetic to spiritualist thought, Cannabrava fell under the influence of modern Anglo-American positivism. Speculative metaphysics he thereafter dismissed as sterile. In this class he included Marxism, not worthy even to be called a philosophical method, but as ‘religiáo pura e simples’. His mature positive views are mainly concerned with a method, with which philosophy becomes more or less coextensive. The driving thesis in his methodology is the view that a unification of formal and empirical truth, and of deductive and inductive disciplines, is both possible and desirable, and that the distinctions between them are not absolute. He attempts to show this by arguing that the methods of both deductive and inductive investigations can be reduced to or identified with language. This requires him to assert, for example, that the rules of formal logic are reducible to linguistic structures describable in the disciplines of syntax and semantics. Only when there is a ‘completa identificacáo entre o instrumento metodológico e o instrumento lingüístico’ will we have achieved a satisfactory ‘critical objectivist’ philosophical method. Such a method is in principle applicable to all branches of the subject, from logic to politics.

Interests

• Philosophical logic; philosophy of science.

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Initially Bergson and Heidegger, but later and more importantly Dewey and Anglo-American philosophy of logic and science from Russell on.