Olavo de Carvalho

Career

Olavo started his career as a journalist in several newspapers. He also acted as an astrologer. He taught political philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, Brazil, from 2001 to 2005. He moved to the United States, and works as an international correspondent. He writes a weekly column for the Brazilian newspaper Diário do Comércio and teaches philosophy in an online course to over 2,000 students. Carvalho has previously written for several other magazines and newspapers, such as Bravo!, Primeira Leitura, Claudia, O Globo, Folha de S.Paulo (where he starts to write in February 1977, with an article debut about The Magic Flute in the "Folhetim" literary supplement), Época and Zero Hora, and taught philosophy to a smaller circle of students while still living in Brazil. He introduced to Portuguese-speaking readers works of important philosophers of the 20th century, such as Eric Voegelin, Xavier Zubiri, Bernard Lonergan, René Guénon, and Frithjof Schuon.

He founded the website Maskless Media (Mídia Sem Máscara) in 2002. It presents itself as an observatory of the news media.

He was the host of the show True Outspeak on Blogtalkradio, which aired from 2006 to 2013 and had about 100,000 listeners each week.

The book O Mínimo Que Você Precisa Saber para Nâo Ser um Idiota (The Least You Need to Know in Order to Not Be an Idiot, 2013) is a collection of his many articles for magazines published between 1997 and 2013.

Carvalho founded the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought in 2009, and serves as its president. He collaborates with Ted Baehr, Paul Gottfried, Judith Reisman, Alejandro Peña Esclusa, and Stephen Baskerville through the Inter-American Institute. He exposed the Marxist elite in Brazil, according to Vladimir Tismaneanu.

Among his famous students is the Catholic priest, TV host, writer and professor Father Paulo Ricardo.

Ideas

Carvalho rejects Karl Popper's open society for "not recognizing any transcendent values and by leaving everything at the mercy of economic conveniences – conveniences that are something alleged even to justify the very demolition of the free market and its replacement by the welfare state, based upon taxation and debt."

In some works, Olavo de Carvalho attempts a criticism of mechanicism, strongly criticizing Isaac Newton, Galileo and René Descartes. He explains how Newton's First Law contradicts itself when lacking a traditional metaphysics. According to him, "Galileo and Newton's science belittled the observation of natural phenomena in favour of formulating mathematical models with no relation to empirical reality".

Another target of his criticism is Darwinism. Carvalho wrote: "All he [Charles Darwin] did was to venture a new explanation for that theory [evolutionism] — and his explanation was wrong. No one else, among the self-proclaimed Darwin's disciples, believes in 'natural selection'. The theory in vogue, the so-called neo-Darwinism, proclaims that, instead of a selection mysteriously oriented toward the improvement of the species, all that happened were random changes. [...] 'intelligent design' is not only the final touch of the Darwinist theory, but also its fundamental premise, discreetly spread throughout the whole argumentative edifice of The Origin of Species". He goes on, saying that "Darwinism is genocidal by itself, from its very roots. It did not have to be deformed by disloyal disciples to become something it was not".

Carvalho accused Georg Cantor of confusing "numbers with their mere symbols" in his works about transfinite numbers, and calls his math a "play on words" and a "false logic".