António Bráz Teixeira
Instituto de Filosofia Luso-Brasileira/Academia Brasileira de Letras
António Bráz Teixeira (b. 1936) is Doctor honoris causa at the University of Lisbon, and a member of the Academia de Ciencias de Lisboa and the Sociedade Cientifica da Universidade Católica Portuguesa. He is corresponding member of the Academia Portuguesa de História, of the Academia Brasileira de Letras and the Academia Brasileira de Filsofia (Rio de Janeiro). Besides several other important political and cultural functions in Portugal he was president of the Imprensa Nacional da Casa da Moeda (INCM) for over ten years, starting in 1992, where he supervised on a large scale the main works of Portuguese and Brazilian philosophy and literature. Recent Publications: Formas e Percursos da Razão Atlântica: estudos de filosofia luso-brasileira (2001), História da Filosofia do Direito Portuguesa (2005), Dialogos e perfis (2006), A Filosofia da Saudade (2006), Conceitos e formas de democracia em Portugal e outros estudos da história das ideias (2008) and A Experiencia Reflexiva, Estudos sobre o Pensamento Luso-Brasileiro (2009).
Articles of António Bráz Teixeira
Religião, sagrado e mito em Vilém Flusser
Beginning with Flusser’s early writing on language Language an Reality and the History of the Devil, where God and the Devil appear as mere procurers of the human will by giving sense to God’s creations, Braz Teixeira shows the significance of Religion, the Sacred an Myth in the entire work of Vilém Flusser. Beside his later divergence from most Brazilian thinkers, primarily the so called School of São Paulo, including Vicente Ferreira da Silva, Flusser expresses his interest in religion, in the notions of myth and ritual, and in the significance of sacrifice with the idea that language not only determines what we call natural, but also tries to reach that which is beyond the natural. In the vision of Flusser religion would be the human capacity to understand the sacred dimension of the world, revealing the radical opacity of things. For the author of Natural:mente, myths have a sacred content, but not an immediate manifestation. They are the parting points for history and, depicting the primary structures of our behavior, they are equally the highest expressions of language.