Joaquim de Carvalho: o clerc universitário

Abstract

Professor, librarian, bibliologist and academic publisher, Joaquim de Carvalho (1892-1958) was a pioneer researcher and author of a cultural historiography of philosophical matrix and of the history of ideas, as outlined by Windelband and Dilthey at the end of the 19th century and practiced by Collingwood in the first half of the 20th century.
At the fulcrum of this long period of time that marked the turning point to the Eurocentric agony and during which the European intelligentsia was most divided in its own status – an argument whose key piece is the famous controversial manifesto La Trahison des clercs by Julian Benda – Joaquim de Carvalho has patented the paradigm of the secular clerc: or, if we put it that way, the scholar who, advancing in Spinoza´s episteme, only obeys to his own consciousness that, in the Kantian way, and according to his free ethics of responsibility, transforms it into a deontological obligation.